Life Is Like A Metaphor
by XrhiaX
Summary: Season Two of the 'Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates' series is online! Zutara! Taang! Sukka! High school fic; but only barely. Now with NEW DARKER THEMES! Murder! Kidnap! Rescue! Love! Drama! It's like a fic on crystal meth! CH21: AFTERMATH IS SECONDARY
1. Candle In The Wind

Bright blue eyes snapped open in thick, solid blackness, darting around madly.

Katara's own breath echoed in her ears. She had steadied it in her fugue-plagued state of nightmarish disorientation so she wasn't hyperventilating, her eyes wild in the dark around her. She could feel, under her legs, the rough, damp mud of the ground beneath her, and then, beyond her own breathing, she heard the sound of another person's breath. She thought for a moment on how she was positioned; in her fugue she had been more concerned with what was around her. She was sitting, propped up against a wall of some kind.

She gave a grunt of displeasure, attempting to lift a hand to check her face for cuts. Thick, layered masking tape wound her hands together behind her back, all the way from wrist to wrist and around her hands, securing her hands in fists against one another; she couldn't even move her fingers in the tape. "Wha-?" she frowned in confusion, feeling sweat from the tape in the palms of her hands.

Katara looked around in the dark, trying to find the source of the other breaths in whatever space she was stuck. Her mind reeled and her head spun. She wondered if it was still night; it had to be, with the darkness gripping her relentlessly, inviting her to fall back asleep. Her eyes began to adjust to the dark, and she could see a dim light against wooden stairs leading upward. She tilted her head up hopefully; those stairs looked like an escape route.

A chill ran up her spine as the breaths broke into a sick, amused laugh. _"Sleep well?" _a voice spoke out in the dark; jagged, dark, perverse. It formed a knot in her stomach that made her want to rip herself open to get rid of. She felt her whole body ache for a hug from her father, or even a nasty word from Lydia Roberts, so she could leave this world and go back to some semblance of reality.

Katara felt her chest tighten, glancing around madly for the source of the voice. "Who are you? Show your face!" she yelled out, cursing the way her voice cracked as she cried out to the man in the dark. Her fingers would've trembled if they could. She felt her breathing waver, and her heart wrench in anxiety.

"_Aw, my sweets … are you scared?" _he asked, obviously getting some kind of twisted pleasure from her terror.

Katara's face twisted in horrified unease. Katara's mouth went dry and she swallowed to get rid of the feeling, but it did nothing. She felt her arms move to hug herself, but the tape restricting her arms and causing them to cramp kept them from it. "N- … no," she managed out in a tiny voice, just barely above a whisper. She felt the twisting knot in her stomach tighten as he began laughing again, this time more pleased than before. She felt her fingers trembling despite how tight the tape held them, and her lip beginning to tremble the same. The state of Jin Territa after her rescue filled her head, and she bit her bottom lip.

The laugh was sickening, like he got some warped sense of sexual excitement from her worry. _"Didn't daddy ever tell you not to lie?"_

Katara felt tears begin to well up in her eyes, and she dared them to fall, just so she could do _something. _She was completely helpless to save herself, and she felt sick at the realization that she might not have mad it out of this. She said nothing in reply, but drew up her knees, recognizing that her ankles and feet were bound the same as her hands, burying her face in her knees, desperately hoping that this was all just a dream borne out of worry.

The man stepped into the dim light and she could finally see his sick, pale grin, on oily, white skin, with brown eyes so twisted with perversion that they were almost scarlet red. Dark brown, greasy hair fell messily in front of his face, stubble all over his chin and above his mouth. Katara could dimly make out in the dark that he was wearing some kind of cloak, with the hood pushed back. She tried to grimace in disgust at the man, but the only expression she felt on her face was pure, unadulterated fear.

"Why so quiet? Don't tell me you're _shy …_" he drawled out in curious initiation.

Katara couldn't help but yell out in helpless, desperate anguish. "Fuck you! Let me out of here!"

There was a moment of silence in the echoes of her demand, where Katara saw the sick amusement on his face distort into outrage for a moment, before he fell into a placid, apathetic demeanor that Katara compared to the silent moments before the explosion of a bomb. "I'm afraid you're in no position to be making any demands," he turned his back to her, and she saw how he held his hands behind it; it was an upper-class thing, and she knew it by the way Zuko's father stalked around the mansion in a thick fog of concentration.

Katara was sure she heard the lyrics to one of her favorite songs echoing in the distance. They feltsomehow appropriate, like humming 'take me out to the ball park' at a baseball game, or singing 'auld lang syne' at Christmas.

'_As my life flashes before my eyes …'_

The man looked nothing like anyone with money. She wondered for a moment if he had taken her resentfully; because she had money and he didn't, but then reminded herself that Jin Territa had nearly no money at all. What Agent Jones had said was his 'MO' was clearly the dark, ethnic appearance she and Jin shared. Kelly had also explained to her that this probably was because he had unresolved issues with a woman with the same kind of appearance - most likely an ex-lover, possibly a domineering one who made him feel weak, cultivating a need for him to dominate girls of the same appearance. In other words, the guy was completely out of his fucking mind.

'_I'm wondering 'will I, ever see another sunrise'?'_

The man turned again, seeming to have been thinking throughout the time Katara had been, and met her eyes with narrowed ones. With a quick, sharp smirk, he spoke again. "You want to get out of here?" his voice was ice cold despite the half-smile of deviousness. "Fine."

He stepped toward her, leant down and grabbed her by the shirt, tugging so hard she was sure the whole thing would just tear away, but miraculously, he just pulled her to her feet; albeit nearly giving her a heart attack. She was surprised that he wasn't this violent monster that she had built him up as in her head; he was deliberate. He calculated all this. She figured that was the reason he wasn't already in prison. Not that she liked him - she just knew that once he got physical, there would be no stopping him.

'_So many won't get the chance to say goodbye,'_

Somewhat like Zuko, and Aang for that matter. Zuko didn't freak out much, but when he did, you knew you were supposed to listen, or you'd walk away with a limp. Except she knew for a fact her friends only punched inanimate objects around the place when they were angry. She knew she couldn't say the same for this man.

It was no consolation.

'_But it's too late to think of the value of my life …'_

The man leant down and grabbed her feet off the floor, remembering how her feet were bound, and roughly threw her over his shoulder, which stabbed into Katara's stomach, causing her to groan in discomfort. "Put me down!" she screamed at him, her voice a mixture of some kind of fury and some kind of horror. She didn't see it, but she knew his grin only grew. He intentionally jerked upward as he walked, forcing her to smash into his shoulder again and let out another grunt of pain.

She heard him unlock something metallic and slide it open; it reminded her of the prison bars at the local precinct, the one time she'd been arrested; for vandalism and underage drinking. This made her think of Zuko, who had been the one doing the actual vandalizing.

'_And you can see my heart … beating. You can see it through my chest, that I'm terrified, but I'm not leaving …'_

Katara yelped as her plastic-covered feet made contact with the ground and she nearly toppled on them, before the man in black grabbed her arm again and dragged her into the dark. He shoved her ahead of him and threw her into the blackness ahead of her. Katara made contact with a brick wall at the back of the darkness, her cheek and chest flat against it, with a loud smacking noise. She crumpled at the foot of the wall, biting back tears of pain. Only after the pain began to subside did she notice the fearful breaths around her and loud cry of an infant.

The man growled out in a low voice behind her. "Meet your future, Katara," he ground out his words, his teeth clenched together.

Katara allowed the tears to roll down her face, and she heard someone shushing at the sound of the crying infant.

The man in black spat at the ground and let out a furious grunt. "A smart girl like you should learn not to _fuck _with me."

'… _I know that I must pass this test …'_

Katara found herself wondering why the girls around her didn't yell back _'Well that's all you want to do with us!', _but then she figured that they knew better. She supposed the man did have a sort of point; the intelligent thing to do in a situation like this was to go along, and she failed miserably at that. The baby nearby started screaming deafeningly and the shushing got more desperate.

"Will you **shut** that thing _**up**_?" that loud, vicious voice exploded again, and Katara knew he moved closer by human senses. She heard skin on skin. She had thought she was scared of Zuko's father once, but now she knew she hadn't been. She'd just been merely unnerved.

"No! Please!" there was a girl's voice, the same voice that had tried to shush the baby.

Katara turned her head from the wall and felt her heart tie itself into a knot she'd never felt before. She felt the contents of her stomach - her expensive dinner - rush back up her throat as the man in black hurled a crying lump of reddened flesh away, into the darkness.

"**NO!"**

The echo of the young mother's scream filled her ears as the wretched vomit of horror escaped Katara's lips. There was a deafening thump against brick, or wood, or concrete, or something, and what sounded like a gurgle, and then silence. Except for the mother's broken screams and filthy, hateful insults at the murderer before her, and Katara's stomach convulsing in her middle.

He was every bit the monster of her nightmare.

'_So just pull the trigger.'_

* * *

><p>"Katara!" Zuko knocked the door again. "Please, can we just talk? I know you can hear me!" he pounded the door with his fist. It reminded him of Sokka pounding the door at his New Years' Party. "I understand if you don't want to see me, but I'm not here to recite from Romeo and Juliet! I'm here to tell you something <strong>fucking<strong> _important_!" Zuko growled out in annoyance. "Dammit, Katara!"

He knew someone was home - the lights were on in the upstairs hallway and Katara's en suite bathroom. Could she have gone to sleep? Zuko checked his Rolex, to see it was nearly one in the morning, but that didn't put him off. Maybe he was a little drunk, but no drunker than he had been at dinner. With an annoyed grunt, Zuko took the end of his tie and produced a paperclip from inside it, bending it into a lockpick. He let go of the tie and slipped the paperclip into the lock of the door and tinkered about for a moment, concentrating.

"For fuck's sake …" he muttered, clicking open the lock and smacking his hand down on the doorknob, turning it and pushing it open. He walked into the house and turned his head left, glancing into the kitchen. The light was on - Katara had probably left it like that on accident. She'd probably been drinking to stop thinking about his stupid, idiotic kiss. Zuko gave a breath and closed the front door behind him, walking into the kitchen and reaching for where he was sure the light switch was.

If he'd blinked, he'd have missed it.

He only caught the flash of red on the floor out of the corner of his eye, in his peripheral vision, and glanced disinterestedly, before his eyes widened and his face paled, his whole body freezing over and his mouth falling open. There was a sharp knife on the floor, with a flash of blood on it, with even more on the floor. Whether or not it was Katara's blood, he was unsure, but she was supposed to be the only person in the house.

What he'd come to warn her about had already happened. He was too late. The sick bastard who had raped Jin now had Katara in whatever hole he climbed into at the end of the day, and Zuko had failed to keep her safe. Anger raced through Zuko's veins - how could nobody at all be home the moment a serial kidnapped broke into the house to abduct Katara? He would later realize he'd tried to blame someone else to keep from blaming himself.

Zuko spotted a mug on the counter, steam still rising from it. How long ago had this happened? Ten minutes ago? Five? Zuko turned in shock and walked out of the kitchen, standing for a moment in disbelief in the hallway. If he hadn't stopped for gas, he could've stopped this from happening. He'd have been here when it happened. Like an injured animal, he let out a moan of despair, feeling his knees threatening to give out. "No!"

He felt his lungs contract, his heart leap into his throat and his muscles pulsing. It felt like his whole body was about to explode. His hands grabbed his face, like his face was being scarred all over again, the anguish throbbing through him so bitter is was physical. He could hear her screaming for help in the back of his mind. He could hear her pleas and cries echoing darkly through his head, and it shot like lightning right through his chest.

He screamed out desperately as if it would drown out her wretched voice in his head. **"NO!"**

* * *

><p>Toph glanced back at Aang, asleep in her bed, as she sat on her Apple MacBook, updating her Facebook status from 'It's Complicated' back to 'In A Relationship'. She managed a smile as she did this; she couldn't believe how simply and easily they'd resolved the problem of children. It had been as simple as; 'let's just agree to discuss it at a later date', and things had gone back to normal. Though she wasn't supposed to, she had told Aang about Katara's GPS after sex, before he'd fallen asleep.<p>

After finishing on Facebook, Toph turned to the Google search engine to toy around with the translator, once she was done seeing where some of her favorite lines came up. She smirked slightly; _'The simple pleasures, huh?' _she thought to herself in amusement. She typed in a search for 'don't fuck with me', accidentally clicking the 'I Feel Lucky Button'. As the page started loading, she realized her mistake, cursed her faulty trackpad and dragged the mouse up to the search engine in the corner of Safari.

Toph's hand froze over the keyboard and she felt her blood run cold. She clapped her hand over her mouth and swallowed hard. "Oh my god … Aang …" Toph spoke over her shoulder, in a dry and sickened tone.

Aang moaned tiredly in the bed.

"Aang!" she yelled out in blind panic.

Aang sat up and peered at her, then past her to the grotesque image on the screen. He kicked his feet off the bed and felt a horrified frown growing on his face. "What _is_ that?" he got up and began walking over.

"It …" she drew in a shaky breath. "It's … it's a dead baby." She lifted the hand from her mouth up to her eyes, covering them as she shut them.

Aang drew back in horror. "_What_?"

Toph didn't reply, scrolled down to find some kind of explanation, desperately hoping it was some kind of medical website and not a sick, perverted porn site. Who could possibly get a kick out of seeing something like that? What she saw when she scrolled down was even worse than what she'd seen before. She literally recoiled, pushing back in her chair and jumping out of it, clapping both hands to her mouth. "Oh my god," her voice was muffled by her hands. "Oh my god," she repeated in disbelief.

Aang peered closer. "Is that-,"

"Get my phone."

Aang turned his head to look at her.

"Get my phone!" she screamed at him, before turning away from the computer and holding the sides of her face in her hands, her fingernails digging into her skin. "Oh my god," she repeated one more time, her mind reeling into tight knots and her eyes squeezing shut in denial.

* * *

><p>Unable to get through to the Marina landline, due to the line being busy, Toph and Aang had been forced to walk there. It wasn't a long walk, at least. When they got there, four police cars and two black SUV's were parked there, along with Dr. Kelly Glassman's gold Mercedes. Hakoda and Sokka's cars were also parked before the house. Toph supposed she could count the lot of them, but couldn't be bothered.<p>

Toph and Aang approached the yellow-tape line, where two police officers stopped them. "Identification?"

The green-eyed girl raised an eyebrow dubiously. "I'm here on business. Hakoda Marina lives here, I'm Lao Bei Fong's daughter. I have some important information on a case they're working."

The two police officers exchanged glances. The second one looked to Aang. "And he is?"

"My valet." She gave Aang a proud pat on the shoulder. "Rich parents hire them now. It's the latest fad." She smiled sweetly. "I was good this year so I got a cute one."

Aang turned red, but the police officers lifted the yellow tape and allowed them to walk across the lawn to the front door. Aang felt himself thinking back to the stop on the way where Toph had broken down and he'd had to reassure her that everything was going to be fine. After that, Toph had shelled up and become an oyster, keeping her thoughts and feelings to herself, though he knew she'd break down just as soon as she was alone again.

The two marched into the living room where Sokka, Hakoda, and surprisingly, Zuko, were sitting in some kind of catatonic shock. Kelly was sitting with them, though she was the one keeping them from breaking into little bits right now. Strange really, how happy their family had once been, and how fucked up their life had been over the years; with Kya's death, with Katara being the Painted Lady, with Katara getting shot, and now this …

"Kelly," Toph cleared her throat awkwardly.

Kelly looked up. "Toph … Bei Fong, isn't it?"

"Yeah, Katara's hacker. I found something … uh, relevant." She stuffed her hands into her pockets nervously, like a child confessing to a teacher.

Hakoda looked up immediately. "Relevant? Relevant to Katara?"

Toph's face fell into a frown. "No offense, Mr. Marina, I know you have investigatory privileges because you're a lawyer, but as Katara's dad, there's a conflict of interest. Kelly's investigatory privileges are still valid because, well, she's CBI." Toph pointed out nervously.

Hakoda frowned in worry, before remarking placidly; "You'll make a good lawyer one day."

Toph smiled briefly. "Thank you, sir." She turned to Aang, and caught sight of worried gray eyes. "Aang, stay here with them." Aang nodded, leant down and kissed her on the cheek and took Kelly's seat beside Hakoda, glancing to where Sokka and Zuko were sat in silent disbelief.

Kelly got up and approached the shorter girl. "What did you find, then?" she asked professionally, leading Toph to the dining room, where Agent Jones was stood by a computer, registering evidence, like the mug and the knife.

"A website." Toph answered, pressing her thumbs together in unease. "It's … it's not good." She crossed her arms, discreetly hugging herself.

Kelly nodded in understanding with her eyes forward, fixed on Agent Jones. "How are you coming along with that?" Kelly asked the agent before her, who didn't look pleased.

"It's coming." The blonde muttered in reply, standing straight. Toph took a moment to register the serious woman; she had long, straight, blond hair pulled into a high ponytail at the back of her head, neutral makeup, and warm brown eyes. "Who's this?" the woman asked suspiciously.

"This is Toph, junior hacker extraordinaire, Katara's friend." Kelly smiled briefly. "She found a site."

Agent Jones frowned hard. "Ugh. I hate when they do that. It's disgusting." The blonde looked Toph up and down. "Did you puke?" she raised an eyebrow with a dry question.

Toph shook her head tiredly. "Nearly, but no."

"Did better than I did on my first one," Agent Jones managed a small, reluctant smile. "What's the address?"

Toph approached the desk and cleared her throat. "Uh, I think it was French. _'__Maîtrise des putes'_. I don't know what it means. Don't even know how I remembered it."

Agent Jones looked up from the laptop with a frown and exchanged a dark look with Kelly, who shuddered. Nonetheless, the blonde typed in the address and the same picture of the dead baby hit the top of the page, causing her to frown, but not much else. She spoke to herself, just loud enough for Toph to hear. "Sick bastard. It uses an encrypted IP hider, there's no link to any home computer, and it looks like he set it up on a public computer."

Kelly crossed her arms and pulled down her eyebrows in thought. "French. Why French instead of Spanish?"

Toph looked to Kelly in confusion as Agent Jones looked up also. "What do you mean?"

"Well, if you were going to use a second language to be cryptic, you'd use Spanish, because in America, the second language taught in public schools is Spanish." Kelly got closer to the computer and grabbed Agent Jones' notepad. "Unless you went to a school that taught French as a second language."

Jones nodded suddenly. "He went to a private school," she concluded intelligently.

"Start narrowing down the private schools that teach French in the area."

"He's not from the area," Agent Jones shook her head with a breath. "The oldest case linked here is Natalia Jenkins, twelve, three years ago, and she was taken in _Colorado_. Who knows how many other girls there are?"

Kelly paused for a moment. "Katara does." She pursed her lips reluctantly. "It's time to see if that GPS is still online."

* * *

><p>Blinking tiredly, Katara pressed her face up against the brick wall desolately. Exhaustion had sunken into her system after the vast amounts of adrenaline that had shot through her blood over the course of the night. She fell into a world of restless sleep and fitful nightmares ten times better than the reality of her situation, trying to ignore the wails and cries of a broken young mother no older than she herself was, and the whispering murmurs of the other abductees around her.<p>

When the light of day broke through the cracks in the walls and the room held enough light to not have to peer at things around, Katara's eyes broke open and she stared at the brick wall her face was pressed against in despair. She leant back, away from the wall, falling onto her back, and rolled then onto her stomach, looking around. Girls that had once had tans were now pale around her, from missing the sunlight. Katara also caught sight of a large, still weeping cut on her lower leg and remembered it was from the knife she'd grabbed in a blind panic in the kitchen when the man had abducted her. Katara moved like a snake further into the middle of the room, rolling back onto her back and pulling herself into a sitting position away from the where she'd vomited the other night.

"Does anyone here happen to be able to cut tape?" Katara wondered aloud, her eyes shifting from the tape on her ankles to the girls around her. All the girls were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. It wasn't really 'narrowing it down', but it was the best Katara could do. She could've been wrong; the younger girls could've been younger; they all looked five years older than she figured they actually were. Her eyes danced from girl to girl around the room. Many of the girls were older than her, and yet they were all closed off from the world, terrified to hope for an escape at all. "I'm guessing that's a no," she muttered out in annoyance.

There was a sniffle and a hoarse, shaky breath, soon followed by a few brief words. "None of us make it out alive."

Katara recognized this voice as that of the young mother in mourning. "You're wrong. Jin made it out alive. She's free now - she has a life, a nice guy, her mom, her home … don't you want that?" Katara tried desperately, tugging against the tape around her digits.

The girl, with greasy, dark black hair in a ponytail that had to have been there for years, and pale gray eyes, reacted with a snap; despite not being the eldest here, Katara was sure she had to be the closest thing these girls had to a leader. "Do you think we're stupid?"

Katara was taken aback, and gave a frown. "What?"

"I've been with that psycho for years I've forgotten to _count_. My parents have accepted me as _dead. _Don't you think if there was any way I could escape I'd have taken it?" she snarled darkly at Katara, before recoiling again into a ball of mourning, grieving flesh with a ragged night-dress so outgrown that Katara knew she wouldn't be able to get out of it without a pair of scissors. It was like a horror movie where a dead woman rose from the grave after centuries six-feet-under. "You're naïve to think your life isn't already gone."

Katara was silent for a moment, despite opening her mouth to answer, and not being able to say anything to rebut. She supposed she couldn't blame these girls for falling into a hopeless state if it helped them cope with this. When she opened her mouth to speak, she heard a different voice from afar. It was a scared, young girl, younger than her or the broken mother by a few years. When she looked, she recognized Tamsin Wade.

"I want to go home," she whispered solemnly. "I want … I want my daddy," she added gravely.

Katara felt her heart wrench for the girl and nodded at her in serious agreement. "We'll be okay. We're going to get out. _Soon._" She knew it. Toph, and Kelly, and her father, and Agent Jones were probably already locking onto her location right now, tracking her down with that heat-seeking satellite Toph had spoken of.

Tamsin looked up from the knees she hugged and met Katara's eyes in hopeful despondency. "How?" she asked in a small voice.

Katara had no answer for this, but looked up to where the sunlight poured in through the cracks in the walls and the black-painted windows high up, too high to climb to. "Where there's a will, there's a way." And by fuck did Katara have a will to go home and get the fuck out of this godforsaken shithole and away from that greasy, dirty, twisted nutcase that had brought her here.

There was a subtle noise from afar that Katara wouldn't have noticed if the other girls hadn't gasped and looked. Katara looked over her shoulder, out of that prison-cell door that had reminded her of being arrested, and saw that same greasy, dirty, twisted nutcase standing with a devious smirk. She tried to look fearless, but that goal was left in the dust as the rusty, dirty, gritty prison door ground against more rust as it slid open and the man in black got closer. Katara froze as the man grabbed her shoulder and forced her to lie down in the mud, looking up at him. Her breath hitched in her throat.

"How are we this morning, Katara?"

Katara's fearful expression melted for a moment into deliberate, indignant rage. "Fuck you," she seethed darkly, glaring at him so hard she was sure she'd begin shooting lasers from her face at any given moment.

He unleashed a shady, despicable laugh that made Katara's bones chill. "That can be arranged." And he grabbed Katara from the ground, tugged her up and threw her back against the wall, this time making sure her back hit it first. She gave a grunt as the wind was knocked out of her lungs, but she forced her bound feet against the ground, propping herself up in a half-standing position, unwilling to go down and be below him. In his eyes, she saw a cat, old enough to be wise, but young enough to enjoy the cruelty that passes for entertainment in feline circles.

He approached and grabbed her throat, pushing into it, against the wall. Her eyes squeezed shut and she tried with desperate coughs and gurgles to breathe, choking and spluttering like an aged car that no longer wishes to keep driving. She'd have grabbed his hands and tried to peel them away if her hands weren't bound behind her back. He leant forward and put his lips to her ear as he whispered.

"_I could kill you right now, you know… but what I have in store for you, my pet, is far, far worse."_

He pulled his head back and cocked it like a snake waiting to strike its prey. She winced at the touch of rough fingertips on her collarbone, his hand still on her throat, though he no longer tried to choke her. The fingertips trailed down from her collarbone to the low scoop of her robin's-egg blue tank top. He removed his hand from her throat and she released a desperate cough for breath as he produced a knife from an unseen pocket.

When she tilted her head back to look at him, she saw the knife and froze still, her fists tightening within the tape around them. She felt him trail the blunt edge of the knife in small shapes on the flat of her chest, but she couldn't tell what they were, and then the knife pressed against the neckline of her top. He pulled it down just a little and the fabric split open, causing her to pop her eyes open and curse at him in a low undertone, "Get the fuck away from me!" she cried out, before turning her head away from him defiantly and giving a whine as with simple fingers and the knife forgetten, he slowly tore the tank top from top to bottom.

When Katara's torso was fully exposed, he pushed the top back over her shoulders and allowed it to fall down her arms to the tape on them, admiring her bare chest with a lascivious leer that she knew could not be matched. Despite the situation, Katara couldn't help but feel her face turn red in anger and shame, turning her head back to glare at him and bare her teeth. "Alright then, asshole, take a good look," she bit at him, wondering if Detta Walker was talking to him instead of herself. "Matter of fact, why don't you unzip yourself and show the room full of ladies your teenie-weenie mini-peenie?" she taunted darkly.

The man looked somewhat taken aback, and Katara was sure the girls behind him also did.

"Oh, whats'a matter? Scared? Scared I got teeth downstairs to bite your dick off?" she snarled viciously.

The man's face twisted in angry indecision.

"Or maybe you don't like regular sex; I bet you can only get a boner from raping defenseless women, right, you sick, perverted, inhuman son of a bitch!" Katara screamed in his face, unable to hold back against the girl who had caused a teacher to faint in the middle of a lesson. Katara was sure even the devil on her bare, naked shoulder was screaming at her to stop, but she couldn't. "Well fine, then! Fuck me all you want, but I'll tell you this now; if you think I'm going to cry, you're sadly mistaken. I'm in no way afraid of a sad, pathetic, weak little _child_ pretending to be a big boy!" she shrieked roughly, her eyes twinkling with some dark defiance that she neither recognized nor was able to control.

It was this particular cry that broke the glass window of the man's pretentious patience. He screamed in her face in unexplainable fury, causing her to shut her mouth and her eyes and wait for him to stop to kill her. He grabbed her around the middle and hurled her over his shoulder turning roughly, ignoring the fact that he smacked her head into the brick wall as he turned. She struggled and threatened, but his growls of feral mortification overshot anything Katara had ever been able to understand in her life, and she couldn't stop him from dragging her out of the prison he kept his 'putos' in.

She was a horrid liar.

* * *

><p>Toph ran into the living room, where Kelly was sat again with a cup of coffee, keeping an eye on the sleeping father and brother of Katara Marina, and Zuko Scorsese, who stood by the wall, with a coffee of his own, with Aang, who stood the same, but without coffee. Toph wondered if Zuko could possibly be allowed to see the footage; she knew it would reassure him as to Katara's still being alive, though it would probably unnerve him just the same.<p>

"Kelly." Toph breathed out tiredly; not having slept through the night, but determined to help bring her friend home safely.

Kelly looked up suddenly. "Found something?" she asked hopefully.

Toph shook her head. "She's awake."

Kelly frowned, before understanding what Toph meant and standing up. Zuko and Aang looked from their places by the wall with worried expressions. Toph smiled briefly, as if trying to reassure them, though she herself needed reassuring. She followed Kelly out of the room, back into the dining room, where Agent Jones was watching the screen carefully. Kelly and Toph got around to the other side of the table and looked at the screen intently, in deep concentration.

Toph was disheartened to see Katara forced up against a far wall, with the back of a man to the camera; it looked like a security camera. She had found this feed was live online, and it watched the lost, broken women 24/7. She seemed to be ranting at the man who held her against the wall, who was taken aback in indecision and disturbance. Toph imagined that for a man who did all this to feel big about himself would be outraged if someone tried to take even that away from him by making him feel small and insignificant. She wondered if Katara's rant would be at all positively effective.

Toph jumped when the man grabbed Katara by the middle and threw her over his shoulder in a barbaric fury, letting out a loud scream of anger that Toph could hear via the computer's speakers. Toph had to hold in a cry of terror, wanting to reach out for the screen and snatch her friend away from the beast on screen. He turned to the camera, his teeth gnashing as he growled viciously, like some kind of rabid bear.

"There!" Agent Jones jumped suddenly, pressing a button on the keyboard. A white square appeared around the man's face and a bar opened on the side of the feed, as she ran his face through a mug-shot database.

A mug shot of the same man showed up, with a name. _'Jonathan Evan Prescott III'_

"What the fuck kind of name is that?" Toph screwed up her face in confusion.

"I knew he was high-class." Jones muttered in concentration, running the background check. Her fingers moved at the speed of light as she typed. She paid no attention when Kelly's phone bleeped, or when Zuko and Aang approached at the sound of the excitement.

Kelly grabbed her phone from her pocket and drew it out. It was a text from the FBI tech. _'GPS location centered. Cronus Warehouse, 113 Industrial Park. Cars sent. Get there fast.' _She stared at it for a moment, before looking to Agent Jones frantically. "They got the GPS location."

Jones got up immediately. "I'll drive," she told Kelly quickly, reaching up, fixing her hair and heading for the hallway.

Kelly nodded and looked to the three standing around. "Toph, call 911, give them the address '133 industrial park' and tell them to send three ambulances. Zuko, get your bike, take Aang and follow Agent Jones' car." She instructed them sharply, turning and heading for the living room to wake the two that had finally fallen asleep.

* * *

><p>"Take him alive." Agent Jones crossed her arms, her eyes scrutinizing the police officers before her. "Shoot for the legs." She drew her own gun and breathed a careful breath. "This is a stealth operation. We get in, take the girls, take him down, and get out. We don't know what's in there. Understood?"<p>

The police officers replied with a devoted, understanding silence, drawing their weapons the same as her. Kelly drew nearer, drawing her own weapon, approaching Agent Jones, Agent Howell and Agent Mason with a deliberate expression and a conscious demeanor to her.

"Put that away, Kelly, you're not going in." Agent Jones told her friend, lifting one boot up and putting it up on the running board of her SUV, fixing the laces.

Agent Mason, an aging white man with graying hair and many wrinkles was head of the behavioral analysis unit, and often enforced things when his agents were in the right. Right now, however, he didn't know if Agent Jones was in the right.

Agent Howell was a red-haired man with a low, short ponytail at the back of his head and a tan from Florida sunshine, and he looked on disinterestedly.

Kelly scowled and peered through narrowed ayes at the blonde. "This isn't my first shootout, Alison," she reminded her, holding the gun at her side with no intention of putting it away as her friend had instructed her.

"I never said it was. Conflict of interest." Alison Jones dropped her foot, turned and watched as the officers, including her friend, the one who'd come with her the day she'd brought her great idea to Hakoda and Katara Marina, approach the brick-and-wood warehouse. "I gotta go," she glanced at Kelly professionally.

"You're out of your mind if you think I'm staying here." Kelly crossed her arms, the gun dangling from one hand.

Alison glared at Kelly for a short while. "Stay here or I will shoot you _myself_," she threatened seriously, turning her back to Kelly and approaching the building.

Kelly ignored this comment and followed her, gun drawn and silent as a mouse. Just as Alison did, she pressed her body against the wall of the warehouse as the police officers barged the door. Alison glared daggers at Kelly, but didn't shoot her. As the door smashed open, the officers and the four BAU agents stormed the warehouse, guns and flashlights at the ready. The first shot was fired into the lock on the first door blocking their path, and a police officer kicked the door down.

Alison, though she didn't want Kelly there at all, motioned to her friend to follow her through the door, leading with the end of her gun, her finger already on the trigger, cautious. Kelly followed Alison through the door, into shadowed darkness with spots of sunlight following through from the sunrise outside. Alison grabbed for the utility light on her hip, and it flooded the room with light, illuminating the other police officers in the room, a wall of bars on one side and a circle of sitting, shattered girls beyond it. The two glanced around for the man in black, or 'Jonathan', and remembered back to the live feed online, moving to the other side of the room, where the two saw a wooden door with metal bars around the edges as a frame.

As several police officers stormed the prison-room, which had probably begun life as a secure storage hold for high-risk shipments, Agents Jones, Glassman, Howell and Mason approached the door, with two police officers flanking them. Mason reached out and pushed the door open, moving into the doorway. He was somewhat surprised to see Jonathan Evan Prescott III practicing his hostage situation skills, with an arm around a topless Katara's throat and a gun to her temple. Her hands were still bound behind her back but her ankles seemed to have been freed. Blood marked her forehead, and dripped from her lower leg.

"Mr. Prescott, put the gun down."

"Back off. I'll blow her fucking brains out," Jonathan hissed darkly.

Agent Mason took a hesitant breath. "Mr. Prescott, calm down. I'm sure you didn't mean for any of this to go this far." He reasoned carefully, tiptoeing around the psychopath.

Jonathan gave a curt laugh. "You're wrong. I meant for it to go further."

Agents Jones, Glassman and Howell flanked Mason and raised their guns. "Let the girl go, Jonathan." The aging agent instructed the psychotic before him in a calm and wise fashion.

The man didn't reply, but pressed his gun harder into Katara's head, causing her to pull a face of pain and grind her teeth. She grunted out and her bare toes curled in the dirt in the suspenseful torment. "Agh!" she cried out, before biting her lower lip in pain. Blood escaped from where her tooth pierced her lip. His grip around her throat seemed to tighten as she cried out, bringing tears to her eyes.

"No way in hell, old timer," Jonathan snarled viciously. "This girlie here is my ticket to freedom. I'm going to back out of here with her, get in my car and drive, and nobody's gonna follow us. Or else she gets her brains shot out the other side of her head. Got it?"

"And if we shoot you in the forehead right now?" Mason's grip on his gun tightened slightly.

"Then my muscles will contract and she still gets her brains blown out. Your choice." Jonathan grinned wickedly.

'_And you can see my heart … beating. You can see it through my chest …'_

Alison frowned hard, glancing to Kelly's expression. Her friend was trying her best to look fearless, hiding some kind of worry she hadn't seen before. Alison had figured that Kelly had become some kind of makeshift mom for Katara, considering the way Kelly talked about the girl, and now she knew she was right. Anyone who didn't know Kelly the way Alison did wouldn't have known it. She grimaced; this was the definition of a Mexican Standoff.

Kelly bit her tongue inside her mouth, her mind racing somewhat. She wondered, in some far corner of her mind, how Katara managed to get into these situations, though she was more focused on what she was supposed to do here. A scowl overtook her face and she stared hard at the man who held a gun to her sort-of niece's head. She understood the workings of the serial-kidnapper's mind, though she kind of wanted to know the details of this man's case, but right now her main priority was making sure Katara's brain didn't paint the walls.

'… _that I'm terrified, but I'm not leaving …'_

Jonathan let out a sickening cackle before opening his mouth and speaking in a twisted voice. "You know what the funny thing is?" he cawed out madly, tilting his head back as he laughed, before eyeing Mason with a sick grin on his pale face. "I got her years ago. And it was so good … that I had to do it again. And Again." He seemed utterly enthralled by this realization. Katara didn't quite know what he meant, but she could guess it meant he'd killed the woman who'd begun this long ago, and just kept killing because it was so empowering for him.

Sick fuck.

He tugged Katara backward to a door at the back of the room. "Alright, then, goodbye, ladies and gentlemen. We have to leave - things to do, people to see, you know," Jonathan grinned, pleased with himself.

'_I know that I must pass this test …'_

"One thing, though, Jonathan." Kelly spoke up, the decision in her voice echoing in her head.

Jonathan, seeming amused by this, cocked up an eyebrow. "What might that be?"

'_So just pull the trigger.'_

Kelly was silent for a moment, thumbing back the hammer of her gun. " … Bang." And she squeezed the trigger of her gun. An explosion reverberated through the room and Kelly was almost surprised herself, as a bullet tore through his kneecap and snapped his knee backward. As the knee did this, Kelly was sure he would never walk properly again. Well, as properly as a man would walk after prison.

The gun slipped from his hand in his howling panic, and Katara pulled away from him, though he grabbed for her and missed. Kelly expertly tucked her gun into her hip-holster and snatched Katara's arm, pulling her towards herself and protecting her in a safety-hug, despite the girl being half-naked. It didn't matter - Katara was safe and it was all that mattered. Katara buried her face in Kelly's shoulder and smiled gratefully, her eyes squeezed shut.

* * *

><p>Kelly smiled warmly, leaning against a glass window by the hospital room Katara lay asleep in and looking in. As it had turned out, her leg and forehead had needed stitches, and a punch to the gut had caused some minor internal damage that had needed surgical correction, but otherwise, Katara was fine. Kelly knew from being a doctor that Katara was lucky, and from being CBI, and having heard how three of the girls found in the warehouse had had broken bones which had set wrong and untended miscarriages that could have killed them, it had been enforced in her mind.<p>

Hakoda approached with two coffees. "Hey." He spoke up, his voice hoarse from tears and shouts. He watched his little girl sleep, heavily dosed with sedatives after her surgery.

Kelly looked over her shoulder and smiled tiredly; it was only five in the evening, but she was exhausted. "Hey." She replied simply, taking one of the coffees off his hands. "Thanks."

"No, thank you." Hakoda smiled solemnly. "You saved my daughter's life. And probably her future sex life …" he added for good measure.

Kelly pulled a face with a sigh. "Hm. I've treated so many rape victims … I'm glad Katara won't have to go through all that." She shook her head, before taking a sip of her coffee. "How's Sokka?"

Hakoda tilted his head uneasily. "He's blaming me. But I suppose if it helps him cope, it's good. He's got Toph, Aang, Zuko and Suki …"

Kelly smiled hesitantly. "You're a good father," she noted, her eyes turning back to Katara, who looked as if she slept naturally, peacefully before them. "What about you? How are you coping?" her warm brown eyes showed deep concern and worry for her friend as she asked this question.

"I'm coping." He frowned wanly at the burgundy-haired woman beside him.

She smiled and nodded, lifting a hand and patting him on the shoulder, an assuring gesture.

Hakoda's eyes, that were fixed on Kelly thankfully, turned to his daughter and a relieved smile returned to his face at her frowning in her sleep. "How is she doing?"

Kelly's thought process showed on her face and she nodded calmly. "Better than all the other girls put together. Physically."

"And … emotionally?" he questioned carefully. "How do you think she'll cope with this?"

Kelly paused. "She doesn't have the problem of re-integrating back into normal life, and she's not a rape victim … but I can see her having some anxiety about being alone, in the house especially, since … since that's where she was abducted. I've seen kidnap victims need to be escorted to the bathroom in their own house, become afraid of the dark … I worked with a little girl in Sacramento who became terrified of _corners_, after she was snatched around a corner and taken away from her family for ransom." Kelly sighed shakily. "She could spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder."

Hakoda was silent for a long while, the two of them just watching Katara, focused on the rise and fall of her breathing. At least she was safe. The other road-bumps could be taken care of later. He remembered hearing the doctors say they were going to keep her for a few days to monitor her and make sure she healed properly, so he decided he was going to go home and bring her teddy bear, a book and some new pajamas - he doubted the paper gown she had on right now was very comfortable.

* * *

><p><strong>I'm a bitch, but it's not to say I can't be loved … when did I get all mushy? OH YEAH! <strong>

**Wait, lost it again.**

**Never mind. I kinda wish there had been more diversified character interaction here, but this chapter was really about Katara and her struggle and rescue. I have to admit to liking the dynamics between emotionally-invert Agent Alison Jones and emotionally communicative Dr. Kelly Glassman. I don't know how well Hakoda will cope with all this; it's a big thing for a dad to take in.**

**I was waiting for a good reason to upload, and say; here's my gift to you. But really? Come on, i have no good reasons for anything; I'm a teenager. Oh, random bit of me-ness, I asked my mom to take me to get the PILL from the doctor. It's like ... 'oh btw, mom, can i have the pill so i can have sex with my boyfriend?'. It wasn't fun. I was procrastinating asking her for a whole three days - which is nothing compared to how long I spent thinking about it beforehand - and now, what inspired me to update was when she came in and said 'uh, assuming that now you're going to be on the pill ... where exactly do you plan to ... uh ... commence this ... relation... ship?' and I WAS IN PIECES. Not because it was funny, but because I was so nervous. I laugh when I'm nervous. She said she'd take me, but she doesn't approve, even after admitting to me that I'm older than she was when she became 'sexually active' as we call it in the house.**

**Sokka, also, duly noted, needs a HELL of a lot more screentime. Probably a lot of Sukka-lovin' will help him get past what's happened to his baby sister. Probably a lot of Sokka-Katara brotherly love too. I always love shit like that. OOH. I just had an Idea! Haha, you don't get to know what it is! :) I should have 'bitch' tattooed on my forehead, shouldn't I? This was going to be a two-part premiere, but then i realized that the three I've typed are a better trio, and then I remembered I hadn't finished chapter three. So; enjoy this chapter, and soon you will have the next!**

**REVIEW!**


	2. After The Hurricane

After her ordeal, Katara slept for fifty hours straight and woke up on Friday morning at six AM, to find Charlie beside her, 'The Waste Lands' book and her gray and black thermal pajamas folded on the foot of her bed. She felt a happy smile on her face as the warm sun washed into the room onto her face, and a cool morning breeze accompanied it, taking her hair slightly with it. She was so glad to be safe.

"Morning, sleepy-head," someone greeted kindly from the doorway.

Katara turned her head to see Ty Lee in pajamas, a pink tank top and shorts with a white robe and bunny-slippers, standing in the doorway, her hair pulled simply into a low ponytail at the back of her head. "Morning," Katara greeted the same, groggily. "How long was I out?"

"A good two days, anyway. They weren't keeping me updated or anything; I was just hanging around in boredom. I'm going home later today." She paused and seemed to be thinking of something. "Well, not _home. _I'm staying with Mai, at least until she goes to college this summer. She's headed to Yale."

Katara frowned for a moment. "Zuko's going to college this year, isn't he?"

Mistaking her disappointment for wonder, Ty Lee replied in her usual chipper tone. "Sure is, he got accepted into Harvard! His dad would've kicked him out if not for that, but he's got great English marks, not to mention sciences and humanities."

Katara sighed; she'd been a fool to wonder if these days could last forever; days where she could afford to push him away. But he'd be gone soon; at the other end of the country, and she'd be here. "I'm going to miss him," she admitted with a half-scowl.

Ty Lee smiled warmly. "There's still _loads _of time, Katara! I mean, Spring break is already…" Ty Lee smacked her hand to her mouth. "I _totally_ forgot! Spring break starts next week!"

Katara managed a smile. "Spring break in California," she thought aloud happily. "Sun, Sea, Tourists and the Spring-break surfing competition." She couldn't wait; she was as good a surfer as any guy who competed. She'd gotten third place last year, as a mere high school sophomore, and this year she was going for gold. "Think my dad would let me compete after what happened?"

Ty Lee shrugged thoughtfully, walking into the room and sat on the chair next to Katara. "I don't know - I mean, after what happened, I guess he'd be a little weird about letting you surf in a swimsuit in front of, you know, shirtless guys and stuff …"

Katara nodded pensively. "So … did Zuko come and see me while I was out?" she tried to bite back a blush at the question.

Ty Lee gave a tiny, knowing smile. "You guys are so cute together. Azula and Mai told me about the kiss," she crossed one leg over the other and put her elbow on the arm of the chair, her chin on her hand. "So? Was it good?"

"Answer mine and I'll answer yours." Katara smirked, biting her lip girlishly.

Ty Lee's smile only grew wider. "He came to your house the night you were kidnapped, and he was the one who called 911, came to the crime scene, but couldn't come to the hospital because of the 'family-only' rule, he stopped by _before _school yesterday, _after _school yesterday, and my guess is he's going to stop by today, like, now; even though there's no school. So tell me about the kiss!"

Katara felt a bubble of happiness in her stomach; much better than the sickening knot that had twisted there two days prior. She wondered if things would truly go back to normal after this. She began to think on the kiss. "It was … _really _good. He's a good kisser." She reached for the drink on the bedside table and took the straw between her lips.

Ty Lee bit her lip mischievously. "I heard from Mai, Jin _and _Song that he can kiss good enough to make a girl horny." She leant forward and nearly whispered it out.

Katara nearly choked on the straw, and lifted a hand to make sure she didn't spit out the water. _"What?" _she strained, her eyes narrowing in surprise.

Ty Lee took a hard look at Katara's expression and dropped her mouth open, the corners still tugged up. "Oh my gosh, it's true!" she smacked a hand to her mouth and grinned. "I thought they were just exaggerating!"

Katara blushed harder than she'd ever blushed before and put her drink down. "Shh!" she hissed at Ty Lee, "Keep your voice down!" she shook her head and laughed slightly. "Why does it matter anyway?"

Ty Lee shrugged. "Well, I heard he was … good at other things too." She explained impishly. "And if they were telling the truth about the kissing …" she made a twirling motion with one hand as if to say 'figure out the rest'. "It begs the question, you know?" she looked out the door to see if anyone was listening and smiled at what she _did _see.

Katara shook her head again, still laughing, but still blushing too. She saw Ty Lee looking out the door and leant forward, feeling some pain in her middle but ignoring it. She looked up the hall and saw Zuko approaching with … she narrowed her eyes. _'No Way.'_ Flowers? Surely her eyes deceived her. If could've blushed any harder than she had after Ty Lee's enquiry, she would have. Zuko looked nervous, and uneasy, and it was absolutely adorable.

Ty Lee stood up and smiled at Katara. "I just remembered someone I have to call," she joked, getting up and walking toward the door as Zuko entered the room. "Hey, Zuko."

Zuko smiled hesitantly. "Hey, Ty Lee …"

"Didn't bring _me _any flowers," she noted teasingly, patting him on the shoulder. "Good luck!" she whispered as she passed him.

Zuko laughed nervously, looking down at the bouquet. He finally managed to look up from the flowers to Katara, who was smiling just as hesitantly as he. "Uh … hey." He began nervously, approaching and putting the flowers down on the bedside table. "How are you?"

Katara tried to shrug, but found it only brought discomfort. "As good as can be expected. I guess." She smiled pensively. "It's hard to believe I'm one of the lucky ones. It's the last thing I feel like," she picked Charlie up and put him in her lap, toying with the loose button uneasily.

Zuko tucked his hands into his pockets, his eyes trailing over the puffiness under her left eye, from where she'd collided with a brick wall, chagrin written on his face. "I'm sorry, Katara," he shook his head, shutting his eyes guiltily.

Katara frowned for a moment in confusion. "For what?" She tried to search her mind for something he could possibly blame himself for. There was no way he could've stopped her from being taken, or warned her … Katara furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. The trunk of pictures had been found at Jin's rescue site, and the curious Blue Spirit had _seen _the pictures. "You knew." She whispered, her face growing red, but not from any kind of blush. "You bastard, you _knew_!" she yelled at him hoarsely.

Zuko made no attempt to escape her wrath.

Katara grabbed the stupid bouquet from the bedside table and threw it at Zuko viciously. "Get out! Get the fuck out of here!" she sat up quickly, reaching for the book at the foot of her bed to grab and hurl at him, aiming for his head. She grabbed the paperback and tossed it at him malignly, her aim off by a few inches.

Zuko ducked sideways, his hands going up. "Katara, let me explain-,"

"No!" Katara shouted angrily, pointing a finger at him. "Get the fuck out of here, you son of a bitch! I'll fucking call security! Get _out!_"

With no other choice, Zuko turned and left.

* * *

><p>Iroh stared at his nephew, facedown on his kitchen table and muttering something about his being an idiot. The boy had explained his act of stupidity, its result and his culpability for it. Iroh himself was ashamed of the boy's actions, or lack there of, but realized that expressing such shame would do nothing to improve the situation, and so was watching the boy intently, silently, and carefully.<p>

"… Stupid fucking moron asshole monkey-shit dickhead-,"

With a sigh, Iroh stood up from the table and tucked his hands into opposing sleeves. "Zuko, why don't you have a calming cup of chamomile tea?"

Zuko sat up and lifted his head from the table, meeting his uncle's eyes. He opened his mouth to answer, but then shut it and shook his head in reply, lifting his hands, dropping his elbows onto the table and pushing his face into his palms. "No, Uncle. I'm fine." He mumbled into his hands.

"Clearly." Iroh raised his eyebrows sarcastically.

Zuko would've retorted and snapped at his uncle for being so curt with him if he'd been a little shorter of temper. Instead, he groaned, dropped his hands onto the table and shook his head one more time, Iroh supposed for good measure. "I actually forgot. What kind of idiot _forgets _something like that? Huh?" he asked his uncle, as if Iroh could answer.

Iroh surprisingly frowned. "How did you _forget_?"

Zuko let out a groan and covered his face with his hands again. Iroh discovered he'd said the wrong thing. "I don't know, Uncle! Who am I, fucking _Einstein_?" Zuko grunted into his palms. "I don't know _why _I do the things that I do … maybe I'm a fucking mental case, who _fucking _knows?" he removed his face from his hands to throw them in the air in exaggeration.

Iroh jumped at the sound of the door being slammed behind Lu Ten, and the boy dumping his duffle bag on the hall floor. With a sigh, the old man shook his head and looked out the kitchen archway, into the hall, where Lu Ten was walking toward him. "How was your day?" he eyes his son.

Lu Ten walked tiredly into the kitchen, drew out a chair and dropped into it. "Shit. Thanks for asking."

"No problem." Iroh replied, his feathers unruffled. "What happened?"

Lu Ten shrugged and shook his head tiredly. "Taylor's _pissed._" He leant forward to address his father more clearly, but just ended up dropping his tired head onto the table, feeling it weighed down like a brick lived inside, where his brain was supposed to be. He exhaled a long groan of annoyance. "What's a good present to give a girl who thinks you're a bastard?"

Zuko raised his good eyebrow at his older cousin, who seemed to be in the same kind of situation as he himself was. "What did you do?"

Lu Ten sat up and dropped his elbows onto the table, his hands hovering over his lap, eyeing his younger cousin. "You know we went to Bermuda for Christmas and New Years?" he glanced at his father inquisitively. "And I was drunk the entire time?"

Iroh smirked knowingly. "I do. Quite well, in fact."

"She _stole _my phone, and now she's pissed because there are a couple girls' numbers on it. I mean, _nothing happened!_" he lifted a hand and ran a finger over one of his short sideburns, squeezing his eyes shut with a frustrated sigh. He dropped one arm off the table, reached into his pocket and drew out his phone, to smack it down on the table. It didn't break, but Zuko had thought it would. "She'll calm down, right?" he glanced hopefully to his father.

Iroh pulled a face. "Don't get your hopes up …"

Lu Ten stared at his dad, his jaw dropping open, before he groaned in annoyance. At once, his phone began to whine out 'Airplanes' by B.o.B. and Hayley Williams, and he snatched it up, drumming his thumb against the green button and bringing the phone to his ear. _"What?" _he snarled sharply.

"_Hey, don't shout at me! What the fuck did __**I**__ do?"_

Lu Ten lifted his other hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Sorry. What's up?"

"_I was just, you know, wondering why your lady just bought a ticket to Vegas …"_

A frown that Lu Ten couldn't even explain took over his face. His friend Alex worked at LAX airport, at the desk, and now he found it was lucky that he hadn't introduced Taylor to Alex, in a far off corner of his mind, as the rest of it wondered why the fuck Taylor was buying a plane ticket. "What?" he heard himself breathe out.

"_You totally heard me, dude."_

Lu Ten shook his head, standing up from the chair. "When does the plane take off?"

"_Forty five minutes."_

Lu Ten gave a grunt of concentration. It was easily a forty-five minute drive from Dahlia Coast to LAX at legal speeds. "Damn it. _Shit. _Alright, get me a ticket on that flight."

"_Got it. Hurry, dude. Gonna need a fast ride."_

Lu Ten nodded, though his friend couldn't see him, and hung up. He glanced to his father, tucking his phone into his pocket. "I have a plane to catch." He explained simply.

Zuko scoffed, though Lu Ten hadn't been talking to him. "Where's she headed, then?" he crossed his arms and leant back, amused.

Lu Ten smirked at the situation. "As it turns out, Vegas."

"You should hurry, then." Iroh pointed out.

Lu Ten stayed still for a split moment, before his eyes widened and he turned and dashed madly out the door, grabbing his keys as he ran. Zuko jumped up from his seat and jogged with his uncle to the front door, standing on the porch with him as his cousin powered up the SUV he'd received years prior as an eighteenth birthday present. A laugh escaped Zuko's lips as Lu Ten peeled out of the driveway and raced after his girlfriend.

"Think he's gonna make it in time?" Zuko looked to his uncle with a smile.

Iroh just smiled knowingly.

* * *

><p>"Miss Marina?" the voice of a man came from the doorway, loud and sudden, causing Katara to jolt awake, her hand tightening on the book in her hand, ready to aim. She glanced toward the door and slowly allowed herself to relax at the sight of the tall, blonde, muscular police officer, with pretty green eyes, though green did nothing for Katara after Lydia Robertson.<p>

She offered a nervous smile. "Sorry. You scared me." She explained tiredly.

The officer raised a hand as if to say 'at ease', and walked in with a notepad, shutting the door behind him. At once, the hospital room became an interrogation room, and Katara felt as if she had something to hide. "I'm officer Nick Torres, I have permission from your father to question you as to the events of your abduction." He stated calmly, staying on his feet instead of sitting down.

Katara sat up as best she could and put her hands in her lap, pressing her thumbs together nervously. "Okay, then … where do you want to start?"

"First off, it's my understanding that a rape kit was done on your arrival at the hospital, is that correct?"

Katara nodded pensively. "Yeah." She shuddered; the whole thing had been arguably as bad as the abduction itself; with some guy poking around places she wouldn't exactly have invited a complete _stranger,_ and nodding and going 'hmmm' and 'aha' and mumbling who knows what else.

"That rape kit came back negative …" he shuffled through the reports he'd received from agents Jones and Glassman, and those from Officers Clark and Bennett. "… So, no sexual assault of any kind occurred in the period during which you were abducted, is that right?"

Katara glanced down at her hands, noticing she was wringing her hands uneasily. "I was unconscious during the travel between my home and the warehouse … the warehouse in which I was held. I'm unaware of any sexual assault that may have happened during that time. As for the rest of the period, there was an attempted rape, but that was never completed as a result of the infiltration of the crime scene on the behalves of the police and CBI." She recited calmly, having thought out her entire statement in her head many hours prior.

The police officer wrote all this down and continued speaking. "Are you aware that there is video evidence pertaining to this case, that was posted live on the internet during such a time?"

Katara bit her lip and shook her head. "No."

The police officer scribbled one more thing down and nodded as he did. "Are you willing to identify the man who abducted you in a line-up at the precinct?"

"Yes."

"And finally, are you willing to appear in court to testify in favor of the prosecution against your abductor in the event that you identify him as such?"

Katara looked down for a long time. To go to court and finger the man in front of a jury … to look the man in the eye again … she didn't know if she'd be able to. Her hands seemed to tighten around one another and she shut her eyes as she breathed out shakily.

"Ma'am, would you like me to repeat the question?"

Katara shook her head. "No. I'll do it." She nodded reluctantly.

"Thank you, ma'am," the officer nodded professionally, turned and walked out of the room without so much as a glance backward. Katara imagined he would never see her again, and never think again about this meeting, and she would remember it forever. This meeting would never leave her mind, not completely.

Katara lowered herself back to the bed, her eyes trailing across the ceiling, and let out a sigh of confusion. She rolled onto her side and gripped Charlie tight, to her chest, burying her face in the top of his head. In this moment, she felt utterly and completely alone. She was broken, and angry, and twisted so many ways she was sure her head didn't sit right on her neck, and her heart didn't sit right in her chest. When she was sure there was nobody around to hear her, she shook and shuddered and cried into her teddy bear, her brows down hard and her lip trembling, though no one but her could tell.

* * *

><p>Suki searched the entire house before she found Sokka on Katara's balcony, standing at the rail with a Budweiser unopened in his hand. Hakoda had called her to look after Sokka while he went to the hospital to see his daughter, as Sokka couldn't sit in the same room as Hakoda, let alone the car, and Hakoda knew Sokka wasn't yet able to see his sister. Suki figured the last thing Hakoda needed right now was for his <em>other<em> child to attempt suicide.

"Sokka," she spoke simply, approaching, pulling her jacket closed and zipping it up in the cooling evening air.

Sokka looked over his shoulder to Suki, before looking back out to the suburban paradise around them. Palm trees and pink clouds filled his view, though they looked like green and pink blobs through his eyes right now. He examined the bottle of beer in his hand yet again, this time grabbing the top and pulling the cap off and upending it into his mouth.

Suki took his side, two feet separating them. "How are you?" she tried helplessly.

Sokka shook his head and grunted, taking the bottle from his mouth. "Have a guess," he snarled out at the sky, as if sneering at god.

Suki reached out for him, but he recoiled from her. At this, she sighed heavily, her mind focusing on the same thing as his. "Oh, god, Sokka … I can't believe this happened …" she felt a lump in her throat. She wanted to ask how Katara was, but she restrained herself. "I can't even-,"

"Don't." Sokka turned his head to look at her, raising a hand and pointing at her. "Don't do that."

Suki was taken aback. "Do … do what?"

Sokka felt his stomach lurch and he suddenly groaned out in despair, skillfully dropping his hold on the Budweiser bottle and twirling it in his hand, gripping it upside down by the neck and hurling it across the suburban air. He followed his grunt with a primal roar, tipping his head up to the sky as he did, his fists so tight they left small curvy dents in his palms. The bottle smashed against a house, someone yelled, but Sokka didn't care.

Suki watched as the boy became small again, his hands at his sides and his breathing hard. He jerked once, twice, thrice, and then he was crying. She reached out for him again, and this time he didn't recoil, but embraced her back, desperate. He buried his face in her neck and sobbed uncontrollably. "Shh …"

Sokka placed a sloppy, desperate kiss on her neck and lifted a hand to her upper arm. His tongue grazed her skin and she immediately stopped him.

"Sokka, no-,"

"Please."

Suki paused, a small sigh escaping. His voice came out between despairing sobs, and his kisses grew more and more sloppy against her bare neck. "S… Sokka …" she bit her lip. This wasn't right; Sokka had been with her when Katara had been taken because she'd needed a night with him. In many senses, her friend's abduction was on her head.

"Suki …" he cried into her neck. "Suki, _please._"

Her face screwed up, but she gave in. And after, when he was asleep on her bare chest and his tears were dry salt on her skin, and he simply mumbled his sister's name into her breast as he slept, she felt as if she herself had abducted Katara and subjected her to everything she herself had suffered at the hands of her stepfather. She looked out to the darkening sky and shut her eyes. If she could do nothing for Katara, she could stay for Sokka at the least.

* * *

><p>'<em>They say that time,'<em>

Lu Ten raced through the airport toward his gate, after Taylor, to either stop her or join her. His legs pushed him on the way a gun pushes a bullet. His muscles burnt and his bones ached, but he moved on, head-first through the crowds, his golden eyes darting around madly for the woman with the pretty gray eyes, the pale, freckled skin, the soft, sandy blonde curls, and the heart of gold.

'_Heals everything.'_

He caught sight of the number above a gate and a single-file line of people, the curly-haired girl standing in it with a scowl on her face and a handbag over her shoulder. He slowed to a walk; they weren't going anywhere quite yet; he could finally slow down. He panted and joined the back of the line, his ticket in hand. He had nothing else to bring aboard, but he didn't need anything. He had a passport, a ticket, and a wallet. He would be fine as long as he had Taylor too.

'_But they don't know you,'_

Lu Ten eyed his girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend - he didn't really know the details of their current situation - and realized he didn't need her attention right now; he'd approach her on the plane, where she couldn't run away like she usually did, after take-off. He let a smile on his face at the realization that he was going to _Vegas, Nevada. _He grinned at this and felt jitters in his stomach. He was surprised when a thought of marrying Taylor in Vegas crossed his mind.

'_And the scars you bring.'_

Three years had passed since the two of them had begun dating; many fights, but always fixable. He could imagine the both of them stealing one another away to a hotel room and having hot, crazy sex all night, her once in a gorgeous wedding dress, him once in a dashing suit, but both thrown to the carpet, champagne everywhere … A blush crossed his cheeks and he smiled again, tucking his hands into his pockets and fidgeting with the keys in one of them. He tapped his foot on the floor nervously; holy shit, all of a sudden, he was planning a wedding in his head.

'_Cause you left a jagged hole,'_

There was a clatter behind him, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder, to see a woman with dark, raven black hair and pale skin like porcelain, in a business suit, being helped with a bag she'd dropped. He frowned for a moment. The woman looked up to the handsome man who had lifted her bag for her and offered thanks. Lu Ten's eyes fixed on hers and he stared.

"Thank you, sir." She smiled kindly.

"Not a problem, ma'am," the man handed her the bag.

Lu Ten stared even harder. "Ursa." He whispered to himself.

'_And I can't stand it any more.'_

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Can you believe I just did that? I can't. I know I fucking can't. I figured - fuck it. Let's bring back a lost character - I already did it with Lu Ten … You like Lu Ten's sweetheart? She's modeled for my pretty baby sister, who **_**thinks **_**she has blue eyes, but they're totally gray … :3 Omg, on a totally different note, the day I finished this was the day I nearly died.**

**CAN YOU IMAGINE IF I DIED?**

**Me and my MAMI (:3) were in the jeep, driving up to the farm on a windy back lane, turned a corner and a red parcel-force van was speeding right at us. The van slammed its brakes just as I stiffened in my seat and all my muscles just completely tensed, tyres steaming on the tarmac, turning up into the hedge, and my mam very calmly put the brake down and stopped the car. The van turned so we weren't in its path, drove up on the hedge bank and began to TILT toward us, as it finally came to a halt. **

**I'm like OMGOMGOMGOMGWE' and even SHE looks scared. The van didn't fall on us, and I grabbed my seatbelt and clipped it over myself, breathing like I-don't-know-what and looked at my mom, who's just driving now and thinking aloud; "I could've drove on once he got out of the way, so if he fell on his side, he didn't fall on us. I'd have been dead there if we weren't lucky…"**

**Yup. But I'm alive thank god. Reminds me of when Stephen King got run over and the Dark Tower readers were all like 'omg he's not gonna finish the dark tower! Ah fuck, the tower! It's tilting, it's falling!' …**

**So Ursa is my gift to god for letting me live. Fucking PARCELFORCE; more like DEATHFORCE.**

**REVIEWS! I know it's a short chapter, but ah well. REVIEWIES PLEASIES! On a random note, the text i woke up to this morning was from my boyfriend;**

**'and no outdoor sex' LOL**


	3. Clearing The Debris

Saturday was one of those days where the sun shone through dark gray clouds, and rain poured sporadically. It was a day where rainbows formed in the sky, and you were unsure whether the day would grow sunnier or darker with time. It was one of those days where the whole day felt like six in the morning; where it felt like time was going backward as night fell on the world. Katara woke to the sun shining through the rain on the hospital window and scowled at it.

"Good morning, Katara," a warm, happy voice came from beside Katara.

Katara turned her head to it and saw her grandmother standing up from the chair by the bed. "Gran-Gran!" she exclaimed happily, pulling herself into a sitting position, wanting to hug the woman beside her. She smiled brightly and threw her arms around Gran-Gran, gripping her tightly. Caught unawares, the woman chuckled, but then hugged Katara back. "What are you doing here? What happened to San Francisco?" she wondered aloud.

Her grandmother shrugged thoughtfully. "Pakku insisted we drive out here after we received the news … and now the house is on the paper. We've found a nice beach-house, and we put a down payment on it. Looks like we're moving here, as it would seem." She smiled happily at her granddaughter. "How are you feeling?"

Katara sighed and shook her head. "It's complicated. I don't really know how I'm feeling," she explained honestly, as her grandmother propped the pillows up behind the girl's back.

"Well, we've got plenty of time. What's on your mind?"

Katara smiled briefly. "Did Dad tell you about … about the Painted Lady?"

"I'm well aware of the super-heroic antics going on down here, Katara." She nodded kindly. "And I'd recognize your mother's mask anywhere."

Katara cleared her throat nervously. "My friend … Zuko is …" she made a gesture with her hand to avoid having to say it aloud; just in case. She was in a hospital, filled with people, and any one of them could hear someone talking about the hero and villain of the city. Gran-Gran nodded and gestured for her granddaughter to continue. "So … he had a part in rescuing the second kidnap victim of Dahlia Coast, Jin, and there was a box, of pictures that this guy had taken of his victims before he abducted them. My friend went and snooped around the precinct and saw the pictures of _me _in the box. And the bastard _just somehow forgot _to tell me about it until, you know, _after _I was kidnapped." She explained uneasily.

Gran-Gran nodded again. "And just what are you unsure about? It sounds to me like you should be angry."

Katara bit her lip. "I am. But … but I'm sad too."

"Because you thought he was your friend?"

Katara shook her head nervously. "Because … because I thought he … cared for me." She looked down, shut her eyes and pushed out a sigh.

Gran-Gran put a hand on Katara's shoulder. "You mean the same way you care for him." She tilted her chin up knowingly, with a kind smile.

Katara raised a hand to her face to rub at her tired eyes. "Yeah," she answered tensely. "And … and I want to go home." She added, her voice small. "I don't like it here." She realized how childish she sounded, but didn't take back her words to correct herself. There was no point; she'd said the truth.

Katara's grandmother gave a brief frown, but then squeezed Katara's shoulder. "Not to worry; a little birdie told me your discharge papers were being readied as I arrived. We'll get you home lickety-split, and then we can have a nice, big dinner, okay?"

Katara thought of dinner, and then she thought of the kitchen and felt a shiver run up her spine. She didn't show this; instead she smiled and bit back her own anxiety. She had promised herself before she'd fallen asleep three days ago that she wasn't going to become a nervous wreck of a victim as a result of this; that she wasn't going to let that man ruin the rest of her life any more than he already had. But now … now she wondered if she'd ever be able to go back to the way things had been a week ago.

* * *

><p>Zuko arrived home early on Saturday, to find his father pacing in the hall, looking over a case file with his brow furrowed. He asked what was going on. "What's up?" he inquired carefully, not wanting to set his father off. The other man waved a hand at Zuko dismissively and further furrowed his brow.<p>

"Mind your business, boy." Ozai told his son absentmindedly, at a mutter due to his distraction.

Zuko shrugged to himself, uncaring, and proceeded toward the staircase with his rucksack over his shoulder.

"You're friends with that Marina girl, aren't you?" Ozai asked calmly - way too calmly for Zuko's liking.

Zuko stopped on the bottom of the stairs and looked over his shoulder, suspicion written on his face. Mulling this over, he wondered if he still was Katara's friend. Katara was mad at him, but he was sure if his ass were on fire she'd put the fire out. "Yeah …" he replied hesitantly. "Why?"

Ozai lifted a hand and scratched his chin pensively. "Jonathan Evan Prescott III hired me to defend him in criminal court against the state. Do you know who that is?" he asked, just to be sure his son understood what he was talking about.

Zuko frowned hard. "Of course."

Ozai began pacing again. "His case doesn't hold water, understandably … unless I can prove temporary insanity."

"He kidnapped nineteen girls over **five years**, and **killed** two of them. You really think that'll work?" Zuko scoffed, continuing up the stairs. "Why are you doing this case anyway? Don't you have _any _morals?" he added darkly, knowing his father wasn't a runner, and even if he pissed him off, he could get to his room and lock it before his father caught up with him.

Ozai shook his head with a humorless laugh. "One would think you were unaware of my profession. I was hired is because no one at Chander, Bei Fong & Marina would take the case. And I never said I was expecting to win this man a freedom he isn't worthy of."

Zuko pulled a face of surprise; he supposed in some kind of way, that was his father's moral code; deserving and worthiness. He replied as he got to the top of the stairs. "You should check if this guy is divorced or something. My guess is a woman fitting his MO left him and he went nuts … probably lost a lot of money too, judging by his … greasiness." He suggested disinterestedly, shrugging up so his bag sat more comfortably on his back. "I'm guessing you plan on throwing the case."

"Would you do different?" Ozai smirked from below.

Zuko stopped short. For once in his life he agreed with something his father was doing. He gave a grunt at the back of his throat and turned his head away from his father downstairs in the marble hall, the bitter disease of thick acrimony clouding his mind. "No," he snarled out darkly. No, he wouldn't.

* * *

><p>The warm wind of spring rushed through Sokka's hair as he sat in the driver's seat of his father's car, his hands testing the feel of the steering wheel before him. Drive. Speed. Perception. They were all traits he admired most; Drive, because of how it had brought two once-poor people, his parents, from the streets, through top universities and to the top of the world. Speed; because if you were faced with something you couldn't beat away, you could run. And Perception; because if he'd been able to see ahead and know his mother was going to be shot in the forehead, he'd have done something.<p>

The top of the Mercedes was down and the warm air brushed his hair against his face as he pulled out of the drive and started down the road toward the hospital. He gauged the gas carefully and cautiously, eyes looking around for anything dangerous. His father had carpooled with Kelly to the precinct to discuss something about Katara's case. Sokka pulled the seatbelt over his chest and clipped it into its buckle.

Maybe this was why speed was important to him. When he did run, he wanted to run fast. He wasn't a person who 'liked the chase', he was a person who, if he ran, wanted to just go, and not be followed. The wind took his hair back as he drove, and he managed a reluctant smile at the sensation. The smile felt strange on his face; it seemed like he hadn't smiled in forever.

Sokka reached for the stereo and tapped the radio on, turning the tuner to his favorite station. _'Alright, everyone, it's a warm Saturday morning in Spring, and to celebrate Spring break, here's a little Taio Cruz for you! This is Dynamite!' _the radio cried out happily, as if inviting him to dance with it, before it began to belt out the aforementioned song. Sokka felt his fingers drum on the steering wheel as the beat pumped through him.

The car turned a corner and Sokka continued to drive with the smile on his face and his fingers drumming to the music. He noticed the melting ice on the roads, but only briefly; he was trying to be happy today, even if it was just for a short, half-hour drive. He felt himself remembering back to when he'd first begun to drive. He'd been a young fourteen, two years ago, and it hadn't been too long before his mother's death.

His mother had driven him to an empty parking lot in her navy blue SUV, the one he now drove. She'd stopped at one end of the parking lot, turned her head to smile at him and told him he was going to learn to drive today. They'd gotten out of the car, swapped seats and spent three hours in the parking lot stalling, braking too sharply, screwing up with the clutch and many other failings, but afterwards, Sokka had been able to drive. Sokka ceded to his own mind that perhaps that was why driving was his escape; because it was the best memory he had of his mother.

"… We gon' light it up, like it's dynamite …" Sokka found himself mumbling along to the radio, the balls of his hands patting against the rubber of the steering wheel as he drove. He struggled not to bob his head to it to boot.

He came to an intersection, to a red light, and brought the car to a steady stop, glancing sideways to the orange hummer beside the Mercedes. The rough-looking passenger of the hummer grinned at him before looking to the driver, who Sokka saw was even rougher-looking, with a few facial scars - none that rivaled Zuko's, but still, they were pretty ugly - and an eye tattooed on his forehead, almost like Bull's-eye from 'Daredevil', except, of course, with an eye rather than a bull's-eye.

The hummer's engine roared outrageously and the driver leant forward to smirk at Sokka challengingly. Ugly-face gave the engine another daring rev and called out to Sokka. "Hey pretty boy! How fast does that thing go?" he cackled wildly, in a grating, thick, deep voice.

Sokka smirked and revved his own engine skillfully, almost to the point that it seemed like the engine would explode, but Sokka let up just before the engine was overloaded. He said nothing, but grinned right back at the driver of the hummer. He reached down to the gearshift and put down the clutch in preparation.

The hummer's passenger strapped himself in and rubbed his hands expectantly. The red light was suddenly accompanied by the yellow one that appeared beneath it. The hummer's brake lifted and it screeched ahead of Hakoda's Mercedes. Sokka grinned as his car stayed in place and the hummer careened ahead of him. He shook his head with a guilty laugh as a car veered out of the hummer's way to avoid smashing into it, biting his lip as the driver and passenger of the hummer held raised fists out of their windows and pumped them in the air angrily, speeding away.

As Sokka proceeded down the road, the driver of the forest green ford fiesta that the hummer had forced into his lane was still staring out the back window at the hummer in awe. Sokka bumped his hand on the horn, reminding the driver that he was in the opposing lane. Sokka finally began to panic when the other driver didn't pay attention to the noise the Mercedes produced, and rapidly drew closer to him. Sokka reluctantly smashed his hand into the horn, roughly pulling on the steering wheel to get out of the idiot's way. At the same time, the other driver pulled on his steering wheel with a loud screeching of tires, ironically pulling back into his lane, just as Sokka did.

'_Dad's going to kill me,' _Sokka thought, grinding his teeth in an 'Oh Shit' expression as the fiesta smashed into the front corner of the Mercedes with impact. The headlight smashed and the hood grew a large dent that misshaped the entirety of it, and the small Mercedes icon at the front of the car had popped out of place and stood on an angle. There was total silence for less than a moment.

The radio continued to sing, though this time, the lyrics 'light it up like it's dynamite' gave Sokka a chill. He knew very little about the mechanics of a car - it bothered him that Suki knew more about it that he did - and wondered if the engine was going to go up any second. The first thing, other than the radio, that Sokka then heard, was the scraping and grinding of metal on metal. His eyes darted to the windscreen of the other car, to stare at the driver in shock.

The green fiesta was _accelerating _into him.

Sokka's bright blue bombardiers eyes focused a little better on the driver and saw that the red-haired man wore a shit-eating grin on his face, and his unfocused brown eyes were heavy-lidded and drunken. Sokka couldn't help but muse upon his shit luck today - a stupid drag-racing hummer, and a stupid drunken fiesta to boot. He reeled the wheel to the right and put the car into reverse, tapping the gas and bringing the car out of the fiesta's path. In annoyance, he smacked the radio off and held the steering wheel, defeated and deflated.

"One waayy … or another … a'mgonnafindja … a', oah, wanwayy or anothurr …" Sokka heard the drunk driver in the other car singing happily, and he glanced up to see the other guy holding up a bottle of beer triumphantly.

Sokka gave a groan at the sound of a police siren approaching, sinking into his seat.

* * *

><p>Katara stood in the foyer of the large hacienda mansion, her eyes fixed on the large stairs ahead of her. She jumped as her grandmother put a hand on her shoulder and shut her eyes with a sigh. "Jeez, Gran-Gran." She shook her head with a humorless laugh, lifting a hand and putting it over her grandmothers.<p>

"Are you all right?" Gran-Gran asked carefully, squeezing the girl's shoulder.

Katara shook her head, but smile briefly. "I'll be fine. I er … I think I'm going to go to the library, if it's all the same to you, to read the next book in the series." She held up her completed copy of 'The Waste Lands' in an explanatory manner. "Sokka said I should read 'Hearts In Atlantis' between the two, but I kind of want to know if Blaine kills them."

"Blaine?" Gran-Gran repeated in wonder.

"The suicidal monorail train, he likes riddles, and if Roland can out-riddle him, he won't kill himself until after the ka-tet get off in Topeka. I mean, Roland's _**got**_ to get to the tower, but Eddie, Susannah and Jake - and _especially _Oy - are all dispensable. Though I doubt Jake is going anywhere, since he already died once …" Katara stopped herself and glanced over her shoulder at Gran-Gran, who wore a warm but completely bewildered smile. _'She's totally thinking 'my granddaughter the nerdy bookworm',' _her mind whispered, teetering a little laugh. "I know, I know, I'm a total nerd," she lowered her head with a tiny, embarrassed smile.

"Not at all, Katara - your mother used to spend hours on end sitting in her bedroom reading Nancy Drew when she was younger, and once she got onto the more advanced books, there was no stopping her!" Kana explained mirthfully. "Come; I'm sure there's something in the library I can read too." She patted Katara on the back, stepped around her and proceeded past the kitchen on the left, toward the library.

Katara glanced into the kitchen uneasily and saw that the floor had been wiped of blood and the counters were clean and unscathed, as if it had never happened. As if she hadn't been attacked in her own home. The very kitchen she and Kelly had cooked dinner in had become something other than a kitchen; it had become some kind of mental battlefield that she dared not enter.

Katara looked down to her pajamas and glanced up the stairs. "Gran-Gran, I'm just going to run upstairs and get my bed robe, okay? It's a little chilly." She called into the library, as she put the book down on the third step from the bottom, ascending the stairs toward her bedroom.

"All right, dear," Kana called back.

Katara got to the top of the grand central staircase and gave a small smile, glancing from her bedroom door to her fathers, and remembered the fight during which Hakoda had believed she and Zuko had spent the night 'boinking'. She then frowned at the thought of Zuko - at the thought of his betrayal. How the fuck had he been pissed about her lying about a nonexistent pregnancy, when he had lied about a very, _very_ **existent** kidnapper set out to abduct and rape her? She tried not to be angry right now, because her head was already thumping in confusion, and anger would only cloud her mind more.

She moved into her bedroom and grabbed up the fluffy white bed robe draped over the turquoise chaise lounge by the double doors that opened into her room. A high-pitched bark caused her to shout out and jump backward, her hands clutching the robe like claws. Her eyes danced around and she saw Ollie sitting on her bed and almost smiling at her, his tail going like a metronome. She steadied herself and drew in a calming breath. "Hi, Ollie," she laughed under her breath.

"Is everything alright, Katara?" Gran-Gran called from downstairs.

"Yeah, I'm fine, Gran-Gran! Just the dog!" she called back.

"Alright!"

Katara turned and stalked out of the room, crossed the hall and jogged down the large flight of stairs, using the banister at the bottom to swing around and double back on herself, heading toward the library, picking up the book at the same time with a low scooping motion. She jogged to the shelf of Stephen King books, slipped 'The Waste Lands' between 'The Drawing Of The Three' and 'Wizard And Glass', and stepped back with a grin. She fixed her eyes on the row beneath the Dark Tower series and saw 'Hearts In Atlantis', bringing her to smile reluctantly as she reached for it.

Sokka had read it, and said that Bobby, a kid apparently in it, was very much like Jake in the Dark Tower series. Katara pulled the book out, thinking about her brother with a warm smile. She wondered why he hadn't come to see her in hospital. And he should've been in the house now anyway. Hakoda had said he hadn't left the house since the abduction. Katara hadn't heard anything upstairs, either.

The book in Katara's soft but bruised hands dropped to the floor and she felt her eyes widen. "Sokka!" she gasped out in realization, just as she heard it begin to rain outside, and a car pull up in front of the large lawn in front of the house. The one of the front doors slammed shut and she jumped, only there was nothing in her hands to drop this time.

Sokka suddenly appeared in the library with a sullen expression and managed a reluctant smile. "You called? Sorry I'm not one of the Gillette guys."

Katara threw her arms around her brother and buried her face in the crook between his chest and shoulder.

* * *

><p>Hakoda Marina was led through the DCPD precinct by a tall police officer of some kind of European background, with Kelly at his side with a worried expression on her face. Kelly glanced sideways at a desk a man was sitting on with a little girl on his knee, wearing a novelty mask replicated of the Painted Lady, blonde hair in twin braids on either side of her masked face. Kelly smiled and waved a hand at the policeman.<p>

"Hey, Millhouse; you back on the force?" she wondered aloud.

The police officer smiled and waved back. "Yeah, I am. Precinct's bring-your-kid-to-work day, too."

Kelly nodded thoughtfully, turning her head back to Hakoda, who stared forwards in an emotionally detached state. The officer ahead pushed open a metal, barred prison door and revealed four cells on the far side of the room. The sound of singing filled their ears.

"… _Oh, first I was afrayed, I was petrafyed … kept tinking I c'nevah liff widdout yew by maside … but then I spen'so ma'nights jus' tinkin' how yadimee wrong, an'ay gru stong, an'ay learnded how'ta ge'long … an'you see me, some buddy new … I ain't that shaned up lil' purrson stilln'lovew'you ..."_

Sokka was sat on a cot with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, looking down at the floor, trying his best to ignore the drunkard in the next cell. Hakoda felt his shoulders droop in relief; his son was completely unscathed and unharmed. Sokka looked up and met his father's cold-looking gaze, guilt written on his face and apology in his body language.

"Your car is at the impound, sir. It's badly damaged." The police officer explained.

"Yeah, got it; my mechanic will pick it up. Get my son out of there." Hakoda waved a hand instructively.

The police officer immediately moved to the cell and produced a set of keys, slipping one into the lock, clicking it open and sliding it aside. Sokka got up from the cot and walked sheepishly out of the cell, averting his eyes from his father's. Kelly patted the boy on the back, before glancing to Hakoda, who took his son's shoulder and began to lead the way back toward the car. She could tell Sokka was dreading being in the car; in a small space with his pissed-off father and a lengthy drive home.

When they got in the car, no words were exchanged; Kelly figured this was because Hakoda planned to pass punishment in the privacy of his own home, once she was gone. There was a deafening silence right up until she brought the car to a stop at an intersection, and Hakoda stared out the window at a large skid mark, swerving across the road. He exhaled a sigh, and both Kelly and Sokka knew what would come would not be pretty.

"Care to regale us with your explanation of what happened, then?" Hakoda glanced over his shoulder, from the passenger seat to Sokka in the back seat.

Sokka felt his stomach sinking, and glanced out the window to the skid mark the hummer had left. "This hummer driver was challenging me to a drag race," he began calmly.

Hakoda's eyes popped. "You _drag raced _my car?" his voice was small and serious; Hakoda had never needed to raise his voice to emphasize the seriousness in it.

"No!" Sokka immediately interjected. "No, of course not! I just revved the engine to make them think I was going to. They peeled off and nearly hit this other car, and that car smashed into me. That guy singing at the precinct was the guy who totaled your car, _not _me." Sokka insisted defensively, as the car resumed moving onward.

"I wasn't trying to pin blame on you, Sokka." Hakoda replied calmly. "I just wanted to know how you ended up _arrested._"

Sokka's eyes narrowed. _"Sure," _he seethed icily, his gaze shifting past his father, to the cream, off-white mansion approaching about a mile in the distance; the hacienda was unmistakable for some miles around; you could even see if from some balconies of the more urban part of town, which was a good two or three miles away from the house. The whole property was large in itself; five acres of grasslands behind the house were affordable due to the fact that Hakoda had refrained from hiring house staff, though the mansion had plenty bedrooms for at least four servants. Katara often thought aloud that if she were in charge, she'd hire a cleaning lady, a chef, a live-in butler and one of the Gillette models to just stand around and look pretty. Sokka would've smiled at the thought, but he couldn't.

Kelly stopped the car before the large lawn in front of the mansion for the boys, or men, to get out. Hakoda unbuckled his seatbelt and clicked open the door, swinging his legs out. He turned and leant into the SUV. "You coming in?" he wondered aloud.

Kelly smiled briefly, vaguely aware that Sokka was getting out of the car, "Nah," she shook her head. "You guys got shit to sort out, and I've got an appointment with one of the girls Prescott abducted." She tugged one corner of her mouth into a half-smile that told him she didn't want to be around when one of them exploded. "I'll stop by tomorrow to see Katara, though; if it's all the same to you."

Hakoda nodded, before frowning. "You mean at the hospital," he assumed, as the beginnings of rain spattered onto the back of his neck.

Kelly screwed her face up thoughtfully. "I thought you sent your mother-in-law to pick her up this morning. She went home hours ago."

Hakoda managed a smile. "Kana." He laughed under his breath. "Alright, I'd best head in, then; before it rains," he stood back and shut the door, before patting the top of the car, the rain beginning to fall heavier, drumming lightly on the roof of the SUV. Kelly pulled away, and Hakoda turned to see Sokka striding into the house without a second thought about his father.

The one of the large twin doors slammed against the doorframe as Sokka disappeared, and Hakoda's shoulders drooped in the rain. He looked out to the mountains and recalled a hiking trip they had gone on as a family; with Kya, when the kids had only been nine and ten. He felt tears in his eyes and tipped his head up to the sky. Kya would've known what to do.

* * *

><p>Lu Ten stared up at the ceiling of the hotel room, a deep frown on his face. Most things had been cleared up in his mind, but his aunt still confused him. He shut his eyes and sighed out in the dark. The bright lights of Vegas shone into the hotel, but they couldn't stop the dark of night taking over the room. His muscular chest had calmed from heaving with his breaths, as the last exercise he'd gotten had been hours ago, and he was sure Taylor was asleep next to him. He was wrong.<p>

"Lu Ten?" her voice was unsure from beside him. "Are you okay?"

Lu Ten's head rolled onto its side and he met her deep gray eyes. "Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I'm … fine," he gave a defeated breath to the air between them.

Taylor clutched the sheets to her bare torso and sat up, looking down at him with concern. "What's wrong?"

Lu Ten glanced past her, out the windows to the lights outside, but then settled his gaze back on her pretty face. What was bothering him? Ursa was on his mind, and twisting knots in it too. "I saw someone, at LAX. It's … complicated," he allowed his face a smile at her. "It shouldn't really be on my mind."

"But it is. Anything that bothers you, you can talk to me about, Lu Ten," Taylor smiled briefly. "Was it an ex-girlfriend?" she bit her lip nervously.

Lu Ten shook his head. "No. It … it was my aunt. She left my uncle years ago; he was abusing her, and my cousins. I thought she left for New York. Either she's back, or she was only an hour away all these years." Lu Ten pulled himself up into a sitting position and lifted a hand to push a curly lock of her hair behind her ear. "Don't worry about it. It's nothing."

"It's not nothing." Taylor replied calmly. "Did you talk to her?"

Lu Ten shook his head again. "No. I memorized the number on her suitcase," he lifted his free hand and rubbed at his eyes. Taylor knew Lu Ten had a photographic memory; it was the key to his medical expertise. "I don't know why."

"You should call her, in the morning. Get it off your chest."

Lu Ten nodded in agreement. "I think you're right," he answered his fiancée; he had proposed a few hours ago, but she hadn't wanted to get married in Vegas. She'd wanted her family to see her walk down the aisle, and his father to walk her down the aisle; her father was dead, but Iroh had been almost like a father to her since she and Lu Ten had begun seeing one another. He smiled softly at her, his thumb grazing her soft cheek. "I also think you're really pretty." He added with a cheeky smile.

Taylor allowed a grin onto her face and the two became a tangle of arms and legs and shouts for the second time that night.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: It is 1:11AM, Saturday, first day of summer vacation here in the moderately small welsh countryside, and I have a ton of amazing ideas that hit me while I was shopping, while I was showering and while I was writing, funnily enough. This story whacks me in the head while I'm in the middle of other stuff. My song right now is Chasing Cars, by Snow Patrol; just feels right.**

**This whole chapter seems to be all tidbits; you'll notice the long segments are the ones where two or more of the gang are in the same place at the same time. Now that Katara's home, we might get some longer bits. I was going to hurt Sokka in a bigger car accident, but I'm saving my car-crash card for later. OH I'M SORRY; did I just give something away? I'm naughty. I was playing with time as well in this chapter; like how Sokka's getting home is actually after the next segment.**

**I'm updating because I got 33 reviews from only TWO chapters! YOU GUYS ROCK! Keep up the reviewing! I aim to get more review for this season than last season, you see? Also, no Toph or Aang or Ozai's angels or Lydia or anyone this chapter :( but I LOVE Lu Ten! Also, today I found out I have an allergy.**

**I'm allergic to gnats. And it's summer. Just my luck.**

**I gotta go start the next chapter! REVIEW!**

**It's right here. Click this button!**


	4. Shadows Of The Past

Katara was running; every few seconds the night would change to day, and the day would change to night, and the city she raced through seemed to be groaning beneath her feet.

She took a panicky glance over her shoulder and saw the cat's eyes chasing her. The ones old enough to be wise, but young enough to enjoy the cruelty that passes for entertainment in feline circles, and the head of security from JCI, Vladimir, right behind him, and behind Vlad was the man in black; the man who'd killed her mother. She turned her head again to look forward, and stopped short, her breathing hard.

The clerk from the convenience store - the one who'd shot her - stood there with a shotgun, and a vindictive expression on his face, with Lydia Roberts at his side, holding the tire iron in one hand and smacking it into the other threateningly. Katara's eyes darted to the men behind her, her breathing fast and hard as they closed in.

Desperately, Katara grabbed for one wall of the narrow alleyway and kicked off it to the next, chimney-climbing upward. A hand grasped her ankle and tried to pull her down, as her hands closed around the fire escape of the tall building she clung to. She stared down and saw her leg bleeding; where the knife had cut her shin in the kitchen, when the abductor - Prescott? - Had attacked her in her home. Someone above her grasped her wrist and tried to pull her up. She tilted her head up, away from Prescott and saw a familiar blue mask. Zuko was on his knees, pulling her by one arm. She lifted the other arm and grabbed his elbow for grip.

Katara got her feet under her and before she could register what was happening, he was tugging her up the fights of stairs toward the roof, and she could hear the rusty fire escape protesting under their weight, and under that of the horde of Katara's enemies who were climbing after them like relentless zombies.

When they got the roof, there was another zombie-like man waiting for them, thirty feet away, holding a grenade. Disease was written all over his face by blemishes and what looked like herpes, and he looked somewhere between forty and a million. "Who is that?" Katara whispered carefully.

"Gasher." Zuko replied calmly, lifting a three-fingered hand with an upside-down revolver in it. With his ring finger, he pulled the trigger, and from such a distance, he blew Gasher's brains out. The hand that had morphed into Roland's - the gunslinger's - missing the index finger and middle finger, and the revolver, disappeared, and Zuko's own hand, full and healthy took it's place as Gasher's active grenade exploded in a dead hand. Gasher had been a character in 'The Waste Lands', in the city of Lud; the one who'd taken Jake to the Tick-Tock man. Katara didn't understand why such a minor character would be in her dream.

Zuko grabbed her hand and pushed her behind him, turning to the direction the horde were climbing up from. Katara, at this point, thought it was kind of stupid for him to be protecting her now when it was his fault they were after her; she knew it. She knew it was his fault; it had to be.

"We'll never survive." Katara cried out from behind him; it didn't sound like some thing she'd ever say.

"Nonsense. You're just saying that because no one ever has." Zuko answered in a nonchalant, British accent that Katara thought would annoy her, but didn't. It didn't sound like Zuko. Katara would learn when she woke up that this was because Toph was in her room watching 'The Princess Bride'.

"I love cereal, yes I do, I wanna fix me a big 'ole bowl, that's right, rise and shine, cereal time!" someone sang out loudly.

Katara's brows came down and she frowned hard in her sleep. She blinked her eyes open at a cold drip on her forehead. She saw the bottom of a cereal bowl and green eyes brightly staring down at her. Katara lifted a hand and wiped the milk from her forehead, groaning tiredly. "Morning, Toph," she yawned.

"Good morning, Sugar Queen." Toph replied in a chipper tone. "Sleep good?"

Katara sat up and scratched her head. "It's kind of a gray area, really," she peered into Toph's bowl. "Why are you at my house?"

Toph grinned. "My parents don't buy Lucky Charms."

Katara smiled at this; it was good to see her friend. "It's good to see you, Toph. I've been surrounded by strangers all week."

The blind bandit gave Katara a friendly slap on the back. "Also, I came to tell you you're coming shopping with me. Sokka says you've holed yourself up here for three days. Two days is where I think is 'pushing it', so I'm taking you into the city and then we're going to my house to write invitations."

Katara raised an eyebrow. "Invitations?"

Toph rolled her eyes. "Did you hit your head, Katara? My birthday…?"

The blue-eyed girl gave a short breath of thought. Toph was a Taurus. "Oh. Right. Sorry, my head is really fuzzy lately. Maybe I did hit my head," she smiled sheepishly.

"No problem. I made you cereal." Toph lifted the bowl on the bedside table and handed it to Katara. "Oh, by the way, your grandma is like a female version of Zuko's uncle. It's weird; like, they both have this secret knowing. I walked up here with cereal and she looked at me like she _knew _I was a sexual deviant."

Tucking her into the bowl of Lucky Charms, Katara snorted a laugh; Gran-Gran was a little eccentric, she supposed. "Are her Jedi Mind Tricks too advanced for you, Toph?" she suggested, a mouthful of Lucky Charms in her mouth.

Toph smirked and her face twisted into an expression of cocky confidence. "No Jedi's mind tricks are too advanced for me, young Padawan. You'd best not forget that," she warned, before slurping up Lucky Charms gracelessly.

* * *

><p>Nobody on the face of the earth could've predicted that Toph would be so happy to spend time having retail therapy. Not even Katara. An hour into their trip, Toph was carrying six shopping bags on each arm, most of them from expensive stores, and a bag of sour strawberry whips that she was sharing with Katara in her left hand.<p>

Unlike Toph, Katara held two shopping bags on one arm, containing a new pair of shoes, some jewelry, some make-up, a new pair of ass-emphasizing skinny jeans, and a blue plaid button-up shirt with elbow-length sleeves. She felt the best of the shopping had yet to be done.

As the two strolled through the mall looking expensive and rich, Toph's pale green eyes caught something that brought a grin to her face. Her eyes lit up hungrily as she saw the cinema's bright red lights. There were four movie posters at the sides of the front of building; a Clint Eastwood movie (Pink Cadillac), The Expendables, with Sylvester Stallone, a new 'Saw' series chapter, and some romantic comedy called 'The Proposal', with Sandra Bullock in it. Toph remembered Lydia saying 'who? Sandra Bollocks?' and it brought a smirk to her lips.

"Feel like a movie?" Toph considered aloud.

The blue-eyed girl distractedly answered, "No, not really."

Toph glanced to Katara, to see her eyeing the shop She, Sokka and Aang knew as the 'Old, Redneck, home-security-nut, George-W.-Bush-fanatic Mecca'. Katara had never paid much attention to said store, and even had once called the shop a 'waste of space', but this was probably because the store had taken the spot of Katara's favorite fabric-and-template shop, and not out of any disagreement with the sale of weaponry and arms. "What, my Glocks aren't good enough for you, Sweetness?"

What Katara was really staring at happened to be a large sniper rifle in the window - probably for hunting - mounted on a display rack with a big cardboard cutout of a hot blonde with a wholly American flag-themed bikini on. "Painted Lady hasn't been around in a while, you know." She murmured, barely aloud. "Pretty sure everyone thinks she's dead."

Toph rolled her eyes and grabbed Katara's elbow, pulling her further into the mall, away from the gun store. Katara stopped eyeing the store after two seconds of Toph's relentless tugging, and formed an expression of curiosity when Toph dragged her into the girls' bathroom and shut the door. The blind bandit drew out a skeleton key from her shoulder bag and locked the door.

"Toph?" Katara asked carefully, one brow raised and her shopping bags limply dangling from one hand.

Toph dropped her shopping bags to the tile floor, the strawberry whips still in her hand. She turned and glanced to the camera in the corner of the room, recognizing that they were still in its blind spot. She found it strange that she herself was exploiting something's 'blind' spot, considering her own sight problems. She shoved the skeleton key back into her shoulder bag and pulled out what Katara recognized as the F001 - or fritzonator - and drew on the touch-screen with a dainty, pink finger the special pattern determined to fritz all local software; a figure-eight with line down the center. A green symbol appeared on its screen and Toph shoved it back into her bag.

"What's all this about?" Katara laughed nervously.

"Katara, you can't go and put yourself in danger like that anymore." Toph slipped her hands into the pockets of her white summer Capri pants, her voice entering a tone of serious discomfort that she rarely used, except in dire situations. Katara imagined Toph would use such a tone if she were trying to reason with a bear.

The blue-eyed girl's demeanor immediately fell into a slouching one, and she stared at Toph in bewilderment. "Oh, Jesus, Toph, not you too," she raised her free hand and wiped it across her brow. "You've got to be kidding me. Toph, _you're _the one who sent me into JCI. This is hypocrisy!"

The blind bandit shook her head. "I know. It's shit, but you … I was the one who found the website, Katara."

Katara's defensive expression seemed to drop a little. "Oh." She glanced aside. "… Right." Her free hand went to the back of her neck. She sighed heavily, her eyes falling half-lidded. "Look, I know what this is about, I know you're worried about me, but my confidence is completely _shot _right now. The Painted Lady … she's like this chamber of confidence I can dig into if my levels are low. I didn't say I was _going _to be her again, I'm just thinking about her. And when I'm her, I can get Zuko back."

Toph immediately frowned. "Get Zuko back for what?"

Katara gave a long and heavy pause, the unspoken words hanging in the air between them for a moment, before she delved into the facts of the story; Zuko's betrayal, the outburst in the hospital room, the pictures in the box. The story went all the way back to Jin's rescue. Toph seemed to get redder and redder, her eyes bulging and her brows sinking down onto them. By the time she finished speaking, Katara's anger was renewed and she would've been happy never to see Zuko ever again.

Toph grabbed up her bags and peeled her face into an expression of hatred. "That bastard!" she exclaimed, fully surprising Katara, who was closer to the door than she was. She moved toward the door of the bathroom, and Katara stepped in her way.

Katara's face fell in horror. "Where are you going?" she asked brusquely.

Toph grabbed Katara's elbow and shoved her aside. "I'm going to give that son of a bitch a piece of my mind!" she replied darkly.

"Toph, don't, there's no point." Katara turned to see Toph with her hand on the door handle. The green-eyed girl glanced over her shoulder and exhaled a heavy sigh of defeat.

"He deserves to get his ass kicked."

Katara nodded, but her eyes pleaded with her friend not to go and wreck the other half of Zuko's face. Eventually Toph died down and they left the bathroom, heading over to a café on the corner opposite Tiffany's Jewelry store. They sat down at a table and eyed one another, just a little bit coldly. One day this would be the mood in a business deal between them. A waiter who couldn't be much older than them came over. Katara absentmindedly took notice of the ash-blonde boy with his hair in a messy style somewhat like Zuko's, only he had a part on one side of it, and half of his bangs veiled his eyes, the other half pushed behind his ear, and his eyes of dark brown seemed equally as distant as she assumed her did right now.

"Can I get you anything?"

Toph tilted her chin up and smiled thoughtfully. "I'll have a cup a' Joe. Black. Four sugars. And a maple pecan tart."

The waiter glanced to Katara simply - she noticed he had expressive eyes that made it possible for him not to need to ask - and smiled briefly.

"Can I get a cappuccino?" Katara smiled back politely, making eye contact with him, reluctantly. When her eyes fell on his, she couldn't tear them away. There was something cryptic about his gaze that she couldn't decipher. Something tingled in her stomach at his agreeing smile and she realized with a slight blush that she was attracted to the (slightly older) waiter.

Toph smirked. _"Bow-chicka-wow-wow …" _she muttered suggestively, with a slight cough, as the waiter left to the kitchen to fetch their orders. "Someone's getting over Sparky …"

Katara glanced away and lifted a hand to her heating cheek with an embarrassed expression. She bit her lip and looked back down to the table, her brows coming down. "I guess I have to sometime." She ceded carefully; by now she'd lost most of her hope that the relationship between Zuko and herself could be salvaged - and when Katara lost hope, you _knew_ things were looking bad.

Toph pulled a face but said nothing. She knew things were bad between Katara and Zuko; especially if Zuko was as big an asshole as she now thought he was. She remembered the start of the new year; when Sokka had been a bastard to Zuko because of the big revelation of Katara's and Zuko's suicide attempts, and would now give anything for a memory of Sokka beating the shit out of Zuko. She was lost in thought by the time the waiter came back.

"Miss?" the boy cleared his throat with a slight laugh; it was cute, she supposed, but blondes weren't really her '_thing'_.

She turned her head from gazing out the window to the boy and gave a happy smile at the coffee he placed before her. "Thanks, Blondie." Toph smirked, and somehow produced a five-dollar bill from thin air. "Here's a tip - from Katara." She raised her eyebrows in a little suggestive dance, and her eyes said 'ya know, for being so hot', without her mouth having to. Katara wondered how somehow she wished Toph's mouth would take a vacation, but now she wished Toph wasn't being so quiet. A silence hung between the three near the table.

Coolly, Katara rolled her eyes, snatched the five from Toph hand and calmly outstretched it to the standing blonde between two fingers. "Yeah. From me." She twitched up one corner of her mouth in a simple smile that showed she was slightly - and objectively - interested in him. "Katara Marina."

The blonde was somewhat taken aback - half by the girl's name and half by her calm introduction. He smiled charmingly. "Nathan Chambers," he slowly took the five from her and put his hand in its place. Her soft, more tanned hand slipped into his quite casually. "Nice to meet you, Katara."

"Likewise, Nathan." Katara's lips finally split to show gleaming white teeth and she made friendly eye contact with him. She would later question how she had been so calm with him, but right now she was just interested - objectively - in Nathan. He continued to smile for a few moments, before he nodded and left them to talk and drink their beverages.

Toph shook her head with a humorless laugh, lifting her cup to her lips and taking a sip of the steaming coffee. "Strange things are afoot." She spoke aloud, her eyes narrowing at the cup as she set it down again. She turned her attention to the maple pecan tart beside it.

"What do you mean?" Katara asked, her fingers on the lip of her cup.

"The seams of our group - the six of us, Me, You, Sokka, Suki, Zuko and Aang - they've been coming apart since New Years'. It started with Sokka being an ass to Zuko, then Lydia tearing Zuko from all of us, and then the split between you and Zuko, then you and your dad, and then with me and Aang, and now I get the feeling things are bad with Sokka and Suki too. Since the kidnap." The green-eyed girl shut the aforementioned eyes and sighed. "A depression seems to have fallen on all of us."

Katara grimaced and bit her lip. "It's always darkest before the dawn," she tried to lighten the mood, or reassure Toph to some degree. Her eyes moved out the coffee shop window to Tiffany's, and she brought her leering gaze on the sparkling objects in the window.

Toph just looked up and met Katara's blue eyes with a dark and serious frown. "The light at the end of the tunnel could be the headlight of an approaching truck."

The Marina girl gave a short laugh, but she knew there was some logic behind what Toph was trying to suggest. Things were going to get worse before they got better: a lot worse.

* * *

><p>Ozai sat in his office on the sixty-fourth floor of the hundred-and-twelve-story building the offices Scorsese, Sisko &amp; Tamesis were housed in, still going over the multiple charges against his newest client. His feathers were not often ruffled, but he couldn't help but be a little ticked off with this. After all, he had a daughter the same age as that Marina girl. Not that he was sympathetic to the daughter of a man who was effectively his rival, but that after what had happened to that girl in the woods Azula and her friends had been hanging out in the previous summer, he'd become somewhat more aware of the vulnerabilities of girls around that age. Worried? No, that wasn't the same thing. He was concerned for his daughter's welfare.<p>

His intercom buzzed for a second, before his secretary's voice hummed out of it. _"Mr. Scorsese, there's a lady here to see you."_

Ozai raised an eyebrow in annoyance - he was beginning to tire of Haku's continual gifts of prostitutes. He pressed in a button on the intercom - he supposed he could do with an hour of relaxation; this case had been on his mind for a few long days. "Send her in."

"_Got it," _Nell, for that was the secretary's name, replied calmly.

The middle-aged father of two glanced sideways at the wall mirror. He heaved a sigh - it wasn't that he was unattractive, far from it. He was aging. His father, a lawyer before him, had told him he would need to prepare to age prematurely in this profession of theirs. It was a stressing job, and sometimes Ozai could even blame it for making him what he was - a cold (he would be a fool not to know people thought him such), aging, stressed, ex-abusive ex-husband and father with no emotional connections to anyone or anything. He liked Azula a little bit, but that wasn't the same thing as being emotionally connected.

That's how he lived; nothing was ever straightforward. He wasn't quite passionate; he was tempered. He wasn't quite alone; he lived with those two teenagers, and he worked with some people he respected (somewhat), but no emotional ties were there. He wasn't quite depressed; he was cold. He tried to remember when he'd been happy, and couldn't find it in his mind. He supposed the last time he'd been truly happy had been before his wedding to Ursa. He had been trying to woo her, to make her a little less upset about her family marrying her off to a man (he knew) she didn't love, or even know. She had been beautiful: the only woman who had wanted nothing to do with the chosen heir to Azulon Scorsese's legacy.

The door made a clicking noise, and Ozai prepared to (yet again) imagine the hooker his partner in business had sent was instead his ex-wife. That was how it always was - she would do her job and he would try his best to imagine, but he wouldn't be able to. Nobody was like Ursa - she had been elegant and classy even during the lovemaking (for that was what he liked to call it, though she called it something far less endearing, in an attempt to belittle it) between the two.

When a woman only slightly younger than him entered with a stoic expression and an elegant, navy-blue business suit on, his mouth parted and his eyes opened a little wider than they had in a while. The woman so lost, so gone, so far away she was almost just a figment of the mind strolled into the office with her chin tipped up the same way his always was, and her bright golden eyes staring at him emotionlessly. Her eyes were so like his, and yet so not. The same color exactly, and yet they portrayed a kind of warmth beyond his comprehension. He was fire, but he was cold. It would've made him laugh humorlessly, but he was perplexed.

"Hello, Ozai," she spoke, in a simple, serious manner.

He stood from his chair and shut his mouth, trying to regain his composure. "Ursa," he whispered, only barely loud enough for her to hear. He felt something in his stomach that he nearly mistook for sickness, but he ignored it. Was she back? No. No, she couldn't be. She wanted something - probably her son, he concluded.

She waved a hand to tell him to sit down - newfound confidence, he noticed - and met his eyes without hesitation. "Sit down." She added, just in case he was unsure.

He sank back to his seat and put his elbows on the desk, leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as he put his fingertips together. "Why have you returned," he seethed between mixed emotions that felt strange in his chest. It wasn't a question, but a demand.

Ursa walked toward his desk and put her hands on it, leaning forward with a cold expression that didn't fit her wonderful, beautiful face. "I never said I had returned, but you're right, I have. Not for you." She glanced down at him condescendingly, and trying to convince herself. "… Not for the man you used to be - I can see that you've changed - but for the home you once provided me, and the children I have provided you."

Ozai scoffed in thought. "What could have possibly gone so wrong that it could send you back … to me?" he managed a tiny smirk.

Ursa retreated from the desk and turned her back to him, before pacing slowly in a circle before the desk. "My son that you so simply dismiss, Ozai, has brought me back to you. Or had you not realized he is the hero of the people, leaping across the godforsaken cityscape you've dug yourself into?" she turned and glared at him again.

Ozai glanced sideways. "Only a great fool would not recognize such a thing. That can't be reason enough to bring you back to me, who _ruined _you for so many years, Ursa. Or had you forgotten the hours in emergency rooms, and the lacerations, burns and cuts I inflicted upon your skin as I climbed the ladder of my empire?" he gestured to said empire around him.

Ursa snarled and grabbed the desk angrily, smacking her hands on the wood, her eyes mimicking his coldness for a moment. "I will **never **forget, Ozai." She growled down at him viciously. "You put me and our children through the **foul** pits of **hell**, and I once would watch you die a **million** deaths before I could rest happy."

Ozai stared up at her and a frown formed on his face as she pulled away from the desk, stood straight and glared down at him hatefully. "Once?" he asked curiously, his eyes trained on her curves, following them right down to her shapely hips. His brows came down hard.

Ursa gave another snarl of cold indecision. "Once, Ozai, I would." She repeated. "And I have yet to forgive you for such foul crimes against your pitiful honor."

Ozai struggled to bite back his anger at this, but he did, nonetheless. He wouldn't have been able to a few years ago.

"But neither of us are the same people we were during our marriage." She shut her eyes for a moment, before training them on him again. "And years I have cried against it and fought it, but I am still in love with you." She formed a face of hate - hatred of him, of the universe for such a strange and hideous fate they had bestowed upon her.

Ozai leapt from his seat and with his brows down yelled at her. "What you believe to be love is Stockholm syndrome, woman!" he cried out bluntly, his mind knotted from the confusion she brought him. Shadows of the past ran rampant in his mind, charging his emotional center and ruthlessly attacking his logic mainframe. "You are out of your **mind**!"

Ursa leant forward and put her hands on the desk again, her face only inches from his. "And?" she raised an eyebrow simply.

Ozai frowned, his eyes falling on her lips involuntarily. "And …" he grunted reluctantly, dropping the heels of his hands to the rosewood desk. "And I must be too," he clenched his teeth and ground them momentarily.

This brought a smirk to his ex-wife's face, though it was only brief. She watched his eyes intently, noticing they fell on her lips like magnets to metal. Simple inches between them barred the kiss she played out in her head for a brief moment, and she knew he dared not close the gap. Ozai showed very little emotion, and practiced few beliefs, but a woman like her knew him from head to toe, inside out and upside-down. He was afraid. This simple notion gave way for her to realize how truly sorry he was, and that he had learnt the error of his ways. Not to say he had grown a heart.

That wasn't the same thing.

There was a long and deafening silence between them as Ursa deciphered her next move. Ozai certainly wasn't going to do anything. Ursa gave another smirk and lifted a hand to his defined, minimalist beard and gave a humorless laugh, enveloping it in her soft hand. "Love handle. Literally." She murmured, before she used it to pull his chin closer to her. Her lips brushed on his, reluctantly at first.

Ozai lifted a hand to her cheek, still unsure - and Ozai was never unsure - and held to it a few soft fingertips, his heart lurching and leaping all at once as she deepened the kiss of her own accord. He had known she had a heart of gold, but never had such kindness been for him. _'Still in love with you' _she had said. He cursed himself, for she must have loved him even throughout the senseless and violent beatings he had once dealt her. He had once believed she had never loved him, and never would. It was strange how he had never known love until it had been for her. He knew he had once loved her, though he had never been loved by another before; before now.

His father had been cold, just like him.

"Ursa," he whispered involuntarily.

And then she was gone. She stood straight and watched him intently for a moment, as he registered what had just happened, blinking once, twice and then shaking his head as if he were dreaming. Ursa gave an expression of indifference and turned her back to him, her hands linked behind her back. "Consuela will let me in, right?" she questioned in a nonchalant tone. "Or did you fire her too, like the secretary you had when I left?"

Ozai stood straight again and walked around the desk, stopping only six feet away from her, her back still turned to him. "Haku Sisko terminated Ms. Brown, after weeks of her denying his sexual advances. Consuela is still in my employment, however." He explained calmly, his eyes yet again falling on her curves - she didn't look half bad for thirty-nine.

Ursa nodded, looking around thoughtfully. "And the children? How are they?" she asked carefully.

Ozai scowled at this - Ursa knew nothing about Zuko's scar, and he feared she would leave if she found out. But, he supposed, she had every right to know. "After you left, Ursa, I fell into a drunken depression. I …" he sighed heavily. "I turned on the boy."

Ursa froze. She licked her dry lips and turned around to face him. "You disgust me," she glared at him furiously.

It took some courage, but Ozai continued. "Allow me to finish."

Ursa said nothing. Ozai took this as an answer.

"The boy's eye … his left eye is badly scarred. I tell you this to prepare you," he glanced over his shoulder, out the large windows to the city around him. "Much has occurred in your absence, most of it has greatly affected the difference between who we are and who we once were. The boy is a dark and quiet child who wants nothing to do with me, and Azula is more like you than I had ever imagined. She is … powerful, and beautiful."

She swallowed hard, feeling a lump in her throat. Her eyes were glassy and she knew her lower lip was beginning to tremble, but she held her stature. "Is she like I once was? Kept in the dark and fed only lies?" she eyed him with ferocious golden eyes like fire. "And why do you never say your son's **name**? Is it because you cannot **bear** to see him as a **person**, for fear you might - for **once** - feel some **semblance** of human **emotion**?" she barked at him miserably, her throat hoarse and her eyes brimming with tears.

Ozai recoiled as if her words were daggers, leant against his desk and adjusted his scarlet red tie, his eyes on her serious and deliberate, no longer admiring her but becoming wary of her. "Your tears will serve no purpose, Ursa; not to me, and certainly not to you. Vast and varied words of apology could have been exchanged between my self and yours, and still no forgiveness could be achieved from such. The same goes between _Zuko _and I," he explained quickly. "We exchange few words, but we are civil to one another. After I scarred the boy, Iroh reported me to the police. I was prosecuted and I did several months in Anger Management courses, all of which I consider to have been somewhat successful."

Ursa's voice rolled over the lump in her throat. "Why are you telling me all this?"

The monster himself rose from the desk and approached her, until he was six inches from her, his eyes downward to meet hers. Her breath hit his neck, warm in the cool of the air conditioning of the office, as he placed his hands on her shoulders. "The road ahead is possibly more jagged and torturous than the road of our past. There are issues to be addressed. You must know this if you intend your return to be permanent. You must know I have changed. You must know we have all changed. Everything has changed."

Ursa turned her back to him again, shrugging away his hot palms from her shoulders, and strode toward the door, finally allowing the tears to roll down her face, but keeping a serious expression as she grabbed the door handle. She tugged open the heavy wooden door and strolled out it, into the halls of the offices. The door slammed behind her, and Ozai was left wondering if she was leaving again, disappearing into the abyss.

* * *

><p>Sokka and Jet had been hanging out a lot lately; mostly at the trailer park, but often in the public parks too. They drank, lit up a dubie every now and then, and howled chauvinistically at passing girls in their eveningwear, on their way to parties and such. Tourism had brought hot, fantastically thin and gorgeous women to the Dahlia Coast this spring break, and with both of them being broken over Jin and Katara's unfortunate abductions they had taken to hanging with the likes of one another - it seemed appropriate.<p>

Now it was nine at night and they were drunk at the park again. Jin was at home, and as far as Sokka knew, Katara was home too.

Sokka sat on one of the swings, swinging slowly and drunkenly, his world spinning. He never drank for recreation, as was told by the New Years' party at Zuko's house. He'd heard from Toph that the stupid bastard had known about the pictures - had known about Prescott - and had done nothing, not even warned her. "I'monna … beat'dshit outta Zuko Scorsese." Sokka grunted darkly, his face tipped to the ground. "I'll wait … 'til … he's alone, and then … I'll jack up th'_other_ half a' that bastard's face…" and then he let out a long laugh of drunken wickedness.

Jet scoffed a laugh, sat at the top of a large jungle gym. "Yeah, _sure … _Jack up the guy your sister's got a crush on … bet that'll put you on her good side." He shook his head and poured some straight vodka down his throat, tipping his head back to do so. Sokka was arguably drunker than Jet was.

Sokka tilted his head back and breathed at Jet, as if from where he sat, he could breathe fire at the other boy. "Who th'fuck told'jou tha?" Sokka snapped viciously.

The Tybalt boy rolled his eyes. "Dude, you have to be like, the only guy who doesn't know …" he gave a chuckle of amusement for a brief second. "I saw them _kiss _at The Aristocrat. She looked like she was on some kind of _cloud nine_." He smirked as if he was making a 'your momma' joke.

Sokka leapt from the swing, grasping one chain in his hand. "You … y'shurrup bou'ma sister!" he pointed with his free hand. Yep - he was a _lot _drunker than Jet. "You … y-you're just a dirty … stinking … dumpster!" he yelled at Jet, slurring. "Y-you're not s'posed to talk anyway!"

Jet grabbed the bar of the jungle gym beneath him and slipped down dropping onto his feet. "Was that a fucking insult?" he growled at Sokka. He wasn't as drunk as Sokka, but he wasn't sober enough to know not to start a fight. "Cause I think it was. You shouldn't be insulting your only friend right now, Sokka."

Sokka laughed wildly. "I c'n'say whaddaywan', thissih' _my _livin'room an'iss'ah free country!" he gestured to the park around him. Somewhere in the distance someone yelled out their window for them to shut the fuck up. "Huh? Huh? Wha'you gon' say 'bout that?"

Jet just laughed and turned his back to Sokka, reaching into his shoulder bag and producing a little coca-cola bottle filled with translucent, greenish juice. He unscrewed the cap and took a long sip, before screwing it back on and putting it in his bag again. He sank to the floor and stared up at Sokka with a shit-eating grin on his face.

"Wh'd'jou jus' drink?" Sokka raised an eyebrow, letting go of the swing and approaching Jet cautiously.

Jet grinned. "Cactus juice." He answered simply. "Peyote. The juice is more of a hallucinogen than the … other … bit."

Sokka sat down beside Jet, leaning against the jungle gym. "A-are'ou sure y'sh'be drinking tha'?" Sokka raised an eyebrow at the bottle, despite his drunken state. "Don'look right … don'think'iss legal …"

Jet scoffed a howl of laughter, grabbing the bottom of his bag and turning it upside down. The coke bottle of cactus juice fell out, along with an iPod, a wallet, a cell-phone, a Swiss army knife and a box of Paracetemol. "Go on, dude … take a sip." He grabbed the bottle and handed it to Sokka.

Sokka stuck his tongue out at the sight of the greenish liquid. "It looks sticky," he grimaced, putting the bottle on the tarmac next to him. "An'I'don'do drugs," he added darkly.

Jet rolled his eyes and glanced at Sokka, before giving a long and hearty laugh, raising a hand and pointing at Sokka like he had paint all over his face.

The Marina boy grumbled incoherently; "Wha'th'fuck you laughing at?"

Jet grinned and wiped his eye, still laughing. "Your fuckin' horns …"

Sokka stared for a moment, before taking another glance at the bottle of cactus juice. He picked the bottle up and unscrewed the cap, taking a precautionary sniff. He made an expression of surprise - it didn't smell too bad. It smelled like that lime drink his kendo instructor made the students drink.

"Go on, dude." Jet insisted.

Sokka brought the bottle to his lips and took a sip of it as he would if he were drinking beer. He had been right; it was sticky, but it tasted nice. He took another sip, this time less wary, before screwing on the red plastic top again and setting it down. His pupils widened slightly as he glanced to the box of Paracetemol. "Wassat for?" he looked to Jet, who looked completely spaced-out.

"For tomorrow morning."

Sokka leant back against the jungle gym and stared into space, his mind becoming filled with rainbows and unicorns and god knew what else. "Whoa." He breathed in awe, his eyes wide and his face forming a grin like Jet's. "That's some good shit." he noted, feeling less drunk, but nowhere near sober. He stared across the street and narrowed his eyes, his mind blurring and making his vision hazy. He shut his eyes and gave in to the rainbows and unicorns, breathing up to the sky. _"Whoa …"_

Jet nodded and said nothing else. There was simple silence, and rainbows, and unicorns.

* * *

><p>Katara lay awake that night, unable to sleep. Her hands placed on her stomach, she stared at the ceiling and breathed a heavy sigh. Ollie jumped to the foot of her bed and walked up along her side to sit next to her elbow. He gave a little noise of questioning, and she continued to watch the patterns on the ceiling. "Everything is changing." She spoke into the darkness. "Sokka is pulling away … and that guy at the coffee shop … Zuko's leaving for college …" she shut her eyes and bit her lip. "Is this what growing up is?" she asked herself quietly, her voice trembling.<p>

Ollie gave a little noise of sadness, rubbing his nose up against her elbow, as if to agree that things weren't looking good.

Katara felt a lump in her throat and gave it a hard swallow. "I don't want to grow up. I wish I was seven again." She lifted a hand and rubbed her nose childishly, sniffing as if she had been crying. For all Ollie knew, she might have been.

Katara meant this; when she was seven, she could run around her house screaming and not question herself, and she didn't care about boys; she just knew they had cooties and they weren't to be trusted. When she was seven, Kya would come and wipe tomato sauce from her spaghetti-o's off her cheeks and help her pack for sleepovers. When Katara was seven, there was no Zuko to complicate her life, put it in danger and still sit in her heart like a piece of lead.

Katara cursed him. "Damn it." She rolled onto her side and hugged herself, tugging the sheets out from under Ollie, and causing him to lose his footing and fall onto the large pile of cushions around the bed - Katara had put them there as a precaution for Ollie. "Stupid sexy Zuko and his stupid sexy … ness." She muttered in annoyance. "How can he be so _hot _and yet so _stupid?_"

Toph, who lay beside her, gave a scoff of amusement. "You're preaching to the choir, Sugar Queen. Aang; total sex-god, but also a total airhead. Kids. What the fuck? Kids. The idiot wants _my _kids." She murmured incredulously. "Dumbass."

Katara scoffed a laugh on her side, her back to Toph. "That's not idiocy, that's love. You guys would make _adorable _babies, too. What was being seven like, for you?"

Toph considered what Katara had said for a moment, before allowing her mind to untangle Katara's question. "Seven. When I was seven, I was hydrophobic, matriphobic, patriphobic, judge-a-phobic, boy-a-phobic and I liked dirt." Toph listed carefully, frowning at the ceiling in deep thought.

Katara laughed out at this. "Patriphobic? Matriphobic? Are those actually real?" she gave a laugh of amazement.

Toph shook her head. "No, but I had 'em all the same. My dad used to blow his top all the time, and my mom used to cry and stuff, and so I just avoided them. It was the best course of action in the end. As for the other stuff, I can't swim because I can't see in the water. The blue hazes everything … I already have trouble with reds, and I have a problem with being anywhere I can't see if a snake is trying to kill me." She made a claw motion with her hands as if snakes had claws and pulled a face, though she knew Katara couldn't see it.

Katara smiled. "Hey Toph?"

Toph turned her head to see the back of Katara's head. "Yeah?"

Katara bit her lip. "Do you think me and Zuko ever had a shot of being in a functional relationship?"

The Bei Fong girl grimaced and thought on this for a long moment. "Honestly, no. Hot sex affair, yes, but functional romance, no. There's too much tension, it's not … it's not what I would call a healthy relationship, considering the fact that you keep so many secrets from one another."

"Why do you think that is?" Katara asked curiously.

"That you keep so many secrets?"

"Yeah."

"I think you're afraid of being judged by each other. Zuko didn't tell you about his suicide attempt because he liked you even back then, even though he didn't know it, and he didn't want to alienate you. You didn't tell him about the fake pregnancy because you knew he'd freak out on you when you told him, _not _because of the blackmail. Etcetera, etcetera."

Katara smiled immediately at this. "We still gotta watch that movie." By 'that movie', she meant 'The King And I'.

Toph replied with a frown. "Katara, have you ever had a bad feeling?"

"Yeah, sure, once I ate some back shellfish-,"

"No, not like that." Toph rolled her eyes. "I mean, where you know something bad is going to happen on a bigger scale than just to you."

Katara hugged herself tighter. "Yeah. Yeah, I've had that feeling."

Toph rolled onto her side, turning her back to Katara. "Things are going to get worse before they get better, you know," she made a face to the alarm clock beside her; it was half-past three. "A lot worse."

Katara glanced out the window to the city. "I know." She replied darkly, her fingernails digging into her own shoulders as she gripped herself desperately. "I have a feeling it'll take a disaster to get this train back on track."

If only they knew.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: AWW, I know Ursa's return to Zuko is long-awaited, but next chapter, I promise. I'm so sorry, guys, but I have a terrible case of writers block. I couldn't write on the other computer, so now my laptop is back and I've been typing this up for ages. I just broke up with my cheating tool of a boyfriend, and my grandmother has completely belittled any self-confidence I had left after that, and my mind is completely shot. So, I have disappointing news. A fair bit.**

**I have no previews, because I have no chapters to preview.**

**I need help with this; I have some ideas, but I need you guys to be onboard with it before I do it, or else it will completely ruin the whole story. Okay, first thing; how do you guys feel about introducing bending into this story? It would make it more authentic, and it wouldn't be until Season Three, (of this story by the way!), and it would introduce a whole lot more stuff for me to toy about with. I'm not going to do it unless you guys are cool with it though.**

**Okay, what is with this Zutara week? Am I just not with the times, or is this not the official Zutara week due in September? Yeah, I'm confused. But then, my mind is shot.**

**I just saw Princess Mononoke, with the English dub because I now have sound on my laptop. It's 2000% better than all the other stuff I've seen, I mean, less death, more maiming, gotta love that, right? LOL, I crack myself up. But I'm still sad.**

**I Love you guys, I'm just so completely screwed in the head right now, that I didn't go crazy with the writing for fear of corrupting the story. I gotta go to bed. REVIEWS PLEASE, I NEED LOVE :'(**


	5. The Verdict

One morning at eight, the sun shone through Zuko's window onto his pillow, but he was already awake. He was dressed in a suit and tie, staring in the mirror uneasily. The chances of regretting this were high, and he knew it, but it was something he had to do. He rubbed the tops of his shoes on the backs of his calves to give them one last shine and considered tying his hair up, but then decided it wasn't quite long enough to do that without looking like a retard. With a breath of nervousness, Zuko grabbed the door handle and strode out into the hallway, looking down from the upstairs landing into the ballroom below, where his father was approaching the large door and Zhao was standing there waiting for him.

"Father." Zuko called, grabbing the rail of the landing and striding down the stairs.

Ozai turned and glanced over his shoulder. "What is it, boy?" he tried his best to be civil; Ursa was in the next room with Azula and he didn't want to attract her into the ballroom for a huge scene before he walked out the door for his day in court.

"I want to come with you. To court." Zuko stated adamantly, reaching the bottom step and dusting his suit jacket down, unused to being dressed so formally.

Ozai's eyebrows went up for a moment, before he turned his head away from Zuko and continued toward the door. "For what reason?" he asked curiously, seeming disinterested.

"You're defending Prescott today." Zuko reminded his father simply. "That means Katara Marina is going to be there, and I need to talk to her." Zuko tried to keep as far as he could from the details, knowing Zhao had the ability to twist most things out of a person's mouth to make them seem like a demon, and knowing Zhao had his father's ear.

Ozai waved a hand dismissively. "This is a serious affair, not a chance for you to get back on your friend's good side. The press will be there to exploit everything they can, including the Marina girl; this is most likely the largest case the Dahlia Coast had dealt with in the past decade. I'll not have you under my feet."

Zuko frowned and shook his head. "I won't be. I promise. You'll forget I'm even there."

Ozai opened his mouth to protest, but only heard a woman's voice from afar.

"Let him come with you, Ozai, he's not going to bother you." Ursa cleared her throat calmly from the doorway of the large lounge with the fireplace. Azula was standing at her side with her lower lip held between her teeth in awe; Ozai imagined Azula was just plain amazed that Ursa was back, and was trying to overcome a dream.

Zuko turned his head to the archway where Ursa and Azula were standing, his eyes torn from Ozai's back. The scarred teen's good eyebrow shot up and the corners of his mouth twitched up, only slightly in his reluctance to become excited before his father. His mother bit her lip and he felt his heart sink; she was looking at his scar. His stomach twisted and he felt sick, but he didn't show it. "Mom." He swallowed hard.

Ursa smiled warmly. "Good morning." She replied, holding a newspaper rolled up in one hand. Zuko could see that the crossword was half done in Azula's handwriting, and half in handwriting he assumed to be his mother's. "I hope you plan on eating something before you leave." She crossed her arms and eyed her son, and then glanced to Ozai. "You too."

Ozai forced down a tiny smile; he refused to be seen as anything other than an authority before his son. Zhao pulled open the door for Ozai, who didn't thank him or even smile at him as he walked through. "Come, Zuko," was all that Ozai said as he walked through the door. Zhao followed Ozai to the car and the door shut behind the two of them, allowing Zuko the confidence he needed to approach his mother and throw his arms around her.

Zuko buried his face in the crook between her neck and shoulder. "I can't believe you're here." He breathed.

Ursa smiled into his tangle of black hair and ran her hand over it. "Neither can I," she gave a weak laugh as he pulled away, her hands still on his shoulders. "We have a lot to talk about." She grimaced, lifting a hand to her son's scar. He flinched a little and she took her hand away, still grimacing.

Zuko bit his lower lip. "It's still tender," explained, referring to his scar. He then shook his head and took a deep breath. "I have to go, he's not going to wait forever." Zuko jerked his head toward the door, indicating he was talking about Ozai. "Azula can tell you most of it, I think." He looked to his sister, who gave a brief smile and a nod. "But I'll be back, later." He promised sincerely, before leaning toward her to give her a brush of a kiss on the cheek.

He turned and ran after his father, his tie flying behind him, and a smile pasted on his face.

Ursa put a hand on her hip and spoke to Azula, watching as the door slammed shut behind Zuko. "So who's the girl?" she raised an eyebrow.

Azula snorted a laugh and grinned. "It's good to have you back, mother. Maybe now Zuko won't be such a man-whoring, alcoholic chain-smoker," she smirked, sliding the newspaper out of her mother's hand and taking another look at the sudoku puzzle.

Ursa snatched the paper back and grinned at Azula. "You're no angel yourself, there, princess." She gave her daughter a playful little nudge with her hip and strode back into the lounge to finish the puzzles on the newspaper. Azula smiled and followed her mother.

* * *

><p>As soon as Katara, Sokka and Hakoda got out of the car hired by the firm they were swarmed by reporters, paparazzi and film crews. Sokka was the first to open his door and step out, only to hear the crowd that had formed outside of the courthouse babbling like seagulls to get their fill of information and footage. The Marina boy shoved back the most unscrupulous of the reporters, who had tried to lean in to get a look into the car.<p>

Sokka offered his hand to his sister, who took it and allowed him to help her out of the car. She set her low black heels on the ground and stood straight. Overwhelmed by the storm of camera flashes that snapped and glanced off every surface Katara could imagine, she blinked instinctively and repetitively, trying to shield her eyes from the flashes. Sokka took his sister's hand and began to lead her through the army of the press. Hakoda got out behind Katara and calmly followed his children up the steps to the entrance of the courthouse, ignoring the press as if they weren't even there.

"_**Miss Marina-"**_

"… _**How does it feel to know-,"**_

"… _**-Raped by the defendant?"**_

" … _**Do you feel about your sister's abduction?"**_

"_**-Blame yourself for your daughters kidnap?"**_

"… _**And do you plan to testify today?"**_

They said nothing to the press, knowing they twisted words to make things look different to how they actually were. Sokka pulled open the courthouse door and Katara walked in brusquely, in a great hurry to be away from the paparazzi outside. When the three of them gathered in the foyer, Sokka and Katara realized that the press were allowed in the building, with much chagrin. Katara put her hands together and wrung them uncomfortably as the paparazzi closed in on them with their mindless chattering again.

Hakoda walked toward the elevator, his children right behind him. He stopped before the elevator, jammed his thumb into the button and waited.

"… _**Be testifying as a witness?"**_

"_**-Know a person can sneak into your house without you knowing?"**_

"… _**-You think the defendant will be acquitted of any charges today?"**_

The doors opened and the three of them stepped in immediately, breathing a sigh of relief when the door shut and the chatter was cut off. Hakoda glanced aside to the man who had already been in the elevator when they stepped in and greeted his rival quite amiably; there was a lot to be said between them, but when it came down to it, they truly respected one another. So what if they were rivals: that didn't mean they couldn't have a mutual respect. It kept things civil and honorable. Ozai had to have been coming up from the basement floor; that was where the paperwork was done for defendants in police custody.

"Good morning, Scorsese."

"Same to you, Marina."

Hakoda cleared his throat. "The media are going nuts," he noted calmly.

Ozai nodded. "That they are." He agreed.

Sokka and Katara exchanged glances of awkwardness. They imagined this was what it was like being in an elevator with a cold war Neo-Nazi and a Jewish New Yorker having a bad day. When the elevator doors opened, they were relieved not to see the press anywhere. The four of them continued down a long, wide, open, bright hall where two large double doors at the end lead into a courtroom. They passed multiple other doors that presumably also lead into courtrooms. Before the large double doors were a much smaller group of reporters and their film crews. This group was less daunting than the man-eating one downstairs.

Sokka was the first to notice Zuko standing at the end of this long hall near the group of press, loitering with his hands in his suit pants' pockets as if he were waiting for something. His grip on his sister's hand tightened, causing her to look up and see what he was looking at. Katara felt her lips part at the sight of Zuko looking around nervously, still unaware that they could see him.

"What's he doing here?" Katara murmured, glancing to Sokka.

Sokka ground his teeth and brought his brows down over deep blue eyes. "We're about to find out." He muttered in reply, as Hakoda and Ozai walked ahead of them.

They went through the same routine of ignoring the press and stalked right through the group toward the large double doors. Zuko approached carefully, and Katara's grip on Sokka's hand tightened as she felt him ball it into a fist. "Sokka, don't." she seethed carefully, before pushing his fist back in his direction, as Zuko took her side and glanced at her nervously. "Why are you here, Zuko?" she sighed tiredly; she couldn't wait to get this all over with.

Zuko lifted a hand to the back of his neck and rubbed it in thought. "I figured you'd need a support crew." He shrugged anxiously.

Katara frowned and glanced at him incredulously. _'Seriously?' _her eyes questioned. Why would he want to be her support crew anyway? She had Sokka, quite obviously, and her father, and Zuko didn't care about her; he'd proven that in neglecting to warn her about Prescott, hadn't he? She ran her tongue over her lower lip and shook her head at him. "What?" she simply managed as she became vaguely aware that they, and the media crew, were moving into the courtroom.

Zuko smiled weakly and breathed a sigh of discomfort. "Look, I came to be here for you. I wasn't there for you before, but now I am. You can tell me to go, but I'm not going anywhere." He promised, with a slight nod of apology. She opened her mouth to protest indignantly, but he stopped her by speaking himself. "I put off catching up with my mom today to be here for you."

Katara's mouth was still open from her indignant reply, which was now forgotten and gone, and she shut it to blink at him. She glanced from one side to the other, before breathing a long sigh of defeat. Much to his surprise, she turned fully to him and threw her arms around her shoulders in a thankful hug. He was caught unawares, but brought his arms around her and squeezed her gently. "Thank you." She whispered, her brows down. "Thank you for coming."

Zuko nodded into her shoulder and felt his hand on her back pat her supportively. "Journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step." He replied warmly, pulling away and smiling at her, his hands still on her upper arms.

Katara didn't need to ask what he meant by this; he was on the road to her forgiveness, and he didn't expect this to patch everything up between them, but this was his first step. Katara nearly opened her mouth to tell him she had already forgiven him, but she refrained. He was right; she needed him here for this, even if she didn't want him to see the states of the other girls Prescott had abducted - what she could've become. She took his hand and led him to where Hakoda and Sokka were sitting down. Ozai had taken his seat at the defendant's desk.

Sokka gave Zuko a deadly glare that made him pale for a moment, but Katara sat between them to keep Zuko out of range of Sokka's fists; she knew something was up with Sokka, but not quite what.

On the other side of the room, two bailiffs led out a blob of orange that Katara immediately recognized with a grimace. The blob of orange walked with an undeniable limp that Katara recalled was Kelly's handwork. Jonathan Prescott's hands were cuffed in front of him as he was shoved into a seat between Ozai and his second counsel, a young man with dark brown hair and a medium complexion like Aang's. Katara couldn't tell much else from behind them.

At the sound of someone struggling to breathe, Katara frowned and leant forward to look past Zuko to the other side of the courtroom, where - like a flock of sheep - the girls Prescott had acquired over the years were sat. One of them - the mother of the dead child - was hyperventilating. Her friend beside her wrapped an arm around her shoulders and tugged her close, calming her down. Katara swallowed at the dry feeling in her throat.

One of the bailiffs cleared his throat and announced formally; "All rise. The honorable Judge Kramer presiding."

The courtroom got to its feet and an aging white man walked out a door in a black robe, up behind the witness box and took his seat at the highest point in the room. He gestured to the courtroom to sit. They sank back to their seats. Zuko noticed Prescott leaning towards his father and whispering something. Ozai waved a hand dismissively at his client.

"We'll hear, first this morning, case 08-769, The United States v. Prescott." The bailiff added, as twelve random people walked out of the door on the other side of the judge's seat, a mirror of the one he had come out of. They took their seats in the jury box, and two or three of them put on their glasses. "For three counts of kidnap in the state of California, two counts of kidnap in the state of Nevada, four counts of kidnap in the state of Arizona, seven counts of kidnap in the state of New Mexico, two counts of kidnap in the state of Colorado, one count of murder in the state of Nevada, two counts of murder in the state of California, eighteen federal counts of Statutory Rape, one count of Sexual Assault in the state of California and nineteen federal counts of assault."

"Alright," the judge began, producing a pair of extremely thick glasses and sliding them onto his face, hooking them over his ears. "Let's get this over with." He rubbed one of his temples with a lone fingertip. "Prosecution, your first witness." He motioned to the desk to his left of the courtroom and one of the four federal attorneys stood.

"Of course. Your honor, I'd like to call Natalia Jenkins as a witness." The attorney adjusted his suit jacket and tie.

The judge simply nodded and the girl Katara had just seen hyperventilating stood up, took a shaky breath and sidestepped past her friend. Natalia walked shakily down the aisle between the two sets of audience seats and through the low gate into the small area before the counsel desks and the judge's pedestal. The bailiff approached the witness chair she took and put a bible on the desk before her. She put one hand on the bible and raised the other as she had when swearing allegiance to the flag in school.

"Do you swear by almighty god that the evidence you give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god?"

"I do."

The bailiff took the bible away and recoiled from the stand as the federal attorney approached the bench. "Miss Jenkins; good morning."

She just stared at him with cold, dead eyes. It unnerved him but he continued.

"Miss Jenkins, would you tell the court where you've been residing for the past five years?" he cleared is throat and made a face of discomfort.

She was silent for a moment before speaking. "I haven't had a permanent residence."

"Okay, what was your last permanent residence?"

"My parents home in Colorado."

The attorney nodded. "And Miss Jenkins, do you recognize the defendant?"

Natalia, who had been staring him in the eye from the start, took a precautionary glance to the desk where Prescott was sat. "Yes." She murmured, before looking down into her lap.

"How did you meet him?"

The witness licked her lips thoughtfully. "I met him in a park in Colorado and he gave me a ride home, two days before … before he kidnapped me."

Ozai rose from his seat calmly. "Objection, witness is accusing the defendant."

The judge waved a hand. "Overruled."

The federal attorney crossed his arms. "Do you remember the night he abducted you?"

Natalia nodded. "Yes."

"Could you walk us through that night?"

Natalia drew in a long and shaky breath before shutting her eyes and nodding again. "I went to bed at around nine, because the school was having a tennis tournament the next day with three other schools. I used to be good at tennis." She looked into the middle-distance like she was in some kind of reminiscent state. "He grabbed me while I was sleeping … and I woke up. I tried to scream but he put something over my mouth. It smelled funny."

The attorney cleared his throat. "By 'he', are you referring to the defendant, Jonathan Prescott?"

Natalia nodded. "Yes." She stared him in the eyes and continued apathetically. "I passed out, and I woke up in the back of a pick-up truck, with a big black tarp over me, like a pool tarp. My hands were tied behind my back. My feet were tied together."

The man before her nodded and began to pace before her, thinking. "And where did the truck stop?"

"It stopped at a motel."

"Could you tell me what happened after the truck stopped, Natalia?"

"He put me in a big duffle-bag in the back of his truck and carried me into a motel room. He let me out of the bag and laughed at me, and then he threw me stomach-first onto the bed. He untied my feet and he raped me and sodomized me." She finished in a detached tone.

The attorney nodded. "Thank you." He turned his back and glared daringly at Ozai, before taking his seat at that big 'federal' desk.

Ozai stood up and smiled briefly at the witness. He approached the bench and gave a shallow bow of the head, which was really not more than a nod, and then brought his hands together, behind his back. "Miss Jenkins. At any point were you led to believe my client was confused, or mentally disoriented?"

Natalia glanced from one side to another thoughtfully. "Yes."

Ozai nodded. "Thank you." And he went to sit down again. Prescott made a face.

The case dragged on like this for two hours, with the prosecution calling witnesses and Ozai simply asking them if they thought his client was 'a bit dodgy', as Lydia would've put it. At noon, the judge called an hour's recess for lunch, and the courtroom emptied out into the hall. Ozai disappeared with Prescott to confer the case, and the feds at the other desk filed out of the room with the audience. The jury disappeared through the same door they'd entered. Hakoda, Katara, Sokka and Zuko left with the audience.

* * *

><p>Katara, Hakoda and Sokka ate in a conference room in the courthouse, mainly because the press was hot on their heels and the staff had decided it would be better for them to be away from the media than to be paraded in the cafeteria. After he finished his sandwich and threw away the wrapper, Hakoda leant forward on the large Conference table.<p>

"They're going to put you on the stand, Katara. Can you handle that?" he questioned calmly.

Katara's eyes met his as she considered this; could she? She would have to, to put Prescott behind bars. "Yes." She told her father adamantly.

Hakoda nodded and stood up. "Kelly's gonna be on the stand too. I'm going to speak with her." He explained with a brief smile. He put his hand on Katara's shoulder, bent and put a kiss on her forehead, before standing straight and striding out the door. The press jumped at him like sharks, but he was calm and walked right through them, drawing them away from the door.

Sokka finished his pork sandwich with a blissful grin and threw the wrapper in the trash, before eyeing Katara and frowning. "This whole day is a nightmare." He sighed in defeat, his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

Katara eyed him with an expression of pity; he was stressed. Yet she couldn't find anything to say to reassure him.

Her brother's face formed a scowl that not even she had seen before, and he stood up, crossing his arms. He couldn't believe she was so blind - Zuko could've saved her from something that had risked her life, her sanity and all aspects of her existence, and yet he hadn't. He was sorry if it made him an asshole, but he wasn't going to abide Zuko's actions (or lack thereof) just because she'd gotten over it. The last time he'd hung out with Jet, he'd had a fistfight with Zuko while tripping on cactus juice. Not that he was addicted to the stuff. No way.

There weren't words to describe how much he hated Zuko. He hadn't allowed himself to completely destroy Zuko the moment he'd seen him earlier because he'd meant what he'd said that first night he'd drank cactus juice; he would wait until he got Zuko behind closed doors. To do otherwise would be stupid.

The door made a clicking noise that caused both Marina children to look up. It opened and Zuko stepped in with a reluctant smile. "Hey."

Katara smiled warmly from the other side of the large oval table. Sokka stood up from his seat and stepped back, pushing it back under the table. He turned around and let his eyes fall on Zuko with a dark and hateful scowl, deep blue eyes sharp as knives, pouring into him like claws into flesh. His fists clenched at his sides and his lips thinned into a deep-set line. Katara's brows came down; Sokka was silent before Zuko for five seconds, and the scarred teen glanced to her as if asking if he was high or something. She shook her head, eyes saying 'I don't know'.

Then Sokka reeled his fist back behind his shoulder and threw his entire weight behind it, until it smashed into Zuko's jaw. Zuko instinctively took a step back and brought a hand to his face, his eyes wide and his jaw feeling like heavy, rusty steel. Pain shot through Zuko's head and he was sure he tasted blood, but he didn't react accordingly. Katara leapt to her feet, eyes just as wide as Zuko's. Zuko didn't move his hand to his jaw, but frowned for a moment in pain.

"Sokka!" Katara yelled at her brother.

Sokka didn't respond, breathing like a bull with its sights on a rodeo clown. His knuckles hurt, but he could easily see himself throwing another vicious punch across the air at Zuko. He wasn't buying any of Zuko's bullshit - he was standing up for his sister, even if she didn't know it.

Zuko's golden eyes fell on Sokka's piercing blue ones and he gave a reluctant nod. "Okay … maybe I deserved that," he admitted carefully, blinking slowly, his mind still turning like clockwork on the force of the punch. His tongue probed his mouth for the taste of blood, only to find he'd bitten his lip as Sokka had punched him. It wasn't bleeding badly, but it was bleeding noticeably. He frowned harder; he hadn't deserved the punch, and it wasn't up to Sokka whether he deserved forgiveness, it was up to Katara. "Actually, you know what, I didn't deserve that." He stood straighter and glared at Sokka. "That was totally uncalled for-."

Sokka's hand came back again and he tightened his fist as if he were punching Prescott himself. He projected his fist through the air and it made contact with Zuko's face with a slapping, thumping noise that resounded throughout the room. His knuckles burned, but he made no move to cradle them; he was too pissed with Zuko to do so.

Zuko went tumbling backward in a graceless manner, his back making contact with the door and causing it to make a loud slamming noise. He made a breathless wheeze as this happened and shut his eyes tightly, bringing his hand to his face and grunting, displeased. Extremely annoyed now, Zuko balled his own fist, pulled himself away from the door and made a primal growl of offense. He reeled his arm back and launched it right into Sokka's enraged expression.

The force behind Zuko's punch was accordingly more so than that of Sokka's - after all, Zuko was slightly older than Sokka - and Sokka went toppling backwards and downwards. He grabbed at the chair behind him, but he only tugged it down with him as his ass hit the gray carpet beneath him. He shoved the chair away and clutched his face.

Katara's hands were on her head in confusion by now, and her eyes were wide like massive pools of concern. She couldn't find the words to express her stance on this battle; on one side, she guessed Sokka was her brother and she should stand by him, and on the other, Sokka had thrown the first punch. She watched as Zuko approached the conference table, looking for a tissue to wipe at the blood on his lower lip.

Sokka shot from his spot on the floor and grabbed Zuko around the knees, forcing him to the floor. The floor made a thump as Zuko hit it, back first, and Sokka straddled the scarred teen with his fists formed and his teeth bared. Zuko's arms went up to protect his face, but Sokka's fist smashed into his stomach and he instinctively went to clutch it. Sokka's right hand exploded into Zuko's jaw again, and again, and again, and Katara panicked, grabbing her brother by the shoulder.

"Sokka, you'll kill him!" she gripped her brother's arm desperately.

With all her strength, she wrenched at his arm until her brother went tumbling backward, onto his back and stared at the ceiling, panting for breath. The media outside was going wild trying to decipher what was going on, but Katara ignored that and glanced from one panting teen to the next. Sokka lifted a hand and held his forehead, where Zuko's fist had hit him.

Zuko made another wheeze of breathlessness as he clutched his jaw in one hand. The fight hadn't lasted long enough for them to look roughed-up, but it had lasted long enough for some alienation between the two of them, and for them to be in pain without having any marks on them. That was good, in a way - the press would've jumped at any sign of drama.

Katara pinched the bridge of her nose. "Well, that was fun," she murmured sarcastically. "Come on, get up."

Sokka clambered to his feet and sniffed gracelessly. He dusted off his suit and pushed back any stray hairs, before snarling down at Zuko like a vindictive tiger. He moved to the door and glanced at his sister. "I'm going to see Dad." He grunted ominously, grabbing the door handle and pushing it down.

Katara eyed him helplessly. "Sokka, don't-."

Sokka turned the door handle and pulled open the door, stepping out and pulling it shut behind him, offering the press a brief view of Zuko lying on the floor that they didn't have enough time to snap a picture of. The door made a loud slamming noise as it made contact with the doorframe, and then Sokka was gone.

Katara exhaled in annoyance, extending her hand to Zuko on the floor. "Come on," she breathed, bending her fingers in a 'get your ass over here' motion.

Zuko grabbed her hand and sat up, before getting his feet up under him and standing straight. He dusted himself off and then ran two fingers over his lower lip, grimacing at the sight of blood on them when he took them away. "Agh," he shook his head, before running his fingers through his hair. "Fuck," he seethed breathlessly, "He's pissed off," he noted obviously.

Katara pulled her mouth to one side and then answered calmly. "Better to be pissed off than pissed on," she smirked humorously.

Zuko glanced at her incredulously for a second before shaking his head and allowing himself a single laugh.

* * *

><p>Katara imagined that the bailiff - as he walked away from her with a bible in his hand - was tired of witnesses swearing oaths by now, since he'd sworn up seventeen people today. She hadn't understood why Natalia Jenkins had been so shaky on her walk to the witness chair three hours ago, but now she did. She sat before the entire courtroom, and somehow she was dreading the federal attorney's cross-examination more that she was dreading Ozai Scorsese's. She would have to walk the entire court through the night she'd been abducted, her rescue, everything.<p>

Everything.

There was an ominous word for you.

Katara shifted uncomfortably in the witness chair - she would've thought that they'd get a more comfortable seat for people testifying to put criminals in jail - and let her bright blue eyes fall on the third of the federal attorneys to get to their feet. Jin had just finished her testimony, just before the federal attorney had called Katara to the stand, and she'd finished in tears. Katara promised herself she wouldn't cry. Funny how she'd promised herself the same thing in that warehouse she and the other girls had been held in.

"Miss Marina." the man gave breath of exhaustion; she imagined it was because he'd heard the stories of sixteen rapes today, and brutal, graphic descriptions of three murders - of two girls and the baby Prescott had hurled across the darkness. "You were abducted from your home in Dahlia Coast not two weeks ago, am I correct?"

Katara smacked her lips and narrowed her eyes. "That's correct." She tilted her chin up shamelessly.

"And do you recognize the defendant," he turned and pointed to Jonathan Prescott, in the orange jumpsuit, beside Ozai, who was looking bored, "As your abductor?"

"I do."

The attorney gave a tired smile. "When was the first time you met the defendant?"

Katara glanced to Jonathan Prescott and grimaced. "The night he kidnapped me."

The attorney lifted a hand to his chin and rubbed it in thought. "So to be clear; you _never _met Jonathan Prescott before the night he broke into your home and kidnapped you?"

Katara turned her head away from the attorney and looked to the jury for a moment. "No." she replied. "I didn't."

The man before her gave a thoughtful nod. "Alright. Walk us through that night, then, Miss Marina."

There was a long and silence pause as she collected her thoughts. Where did she begin? At dinner? In the kitchen? She was at a loss for this, because the night - for her - hadn't begun with the kidnapping. The night never began, the day faded into night, and that day, she had won a fight against the thorn in her side that Lydia Roberts was. Then there had been a nap, and then dinner. She gave a sigh and opened her mouth to answer the attorney. "I had dinner at the Aristocrat, with my friends. They paid for it, it was a 'he's a jolly good fellow' event."

"So you were being celebrated."

Katara frowned in thought. "Yeah." She answered calmly. "You could call it that. I went home around eleven, my brother dropped me off on his way to his workplace." She glanced at his brother, who looked thankful for her not mentioning he'd been taking Suki with him to bang on his desk. "My father had gone into the city to visit his friend."

"You were home alone." The attorney pointed out.

"Yes."

"Are you often home alone?"

Katara gave the attorney a confused glance. "Well … yes."

"So you felt safe in your home, alone, past midnight."

The Marina girl swallowed. "Of course."

"Even fully knowing that there was a predator in the vicinity with plans to abduct you." The attorney crossed his arms and drummed his fingers on his arm. "For the purpose of keeping you captive and raping you."

The jury murmured in confusion and Katara swallowed again, her mouth becoming dry. Prescott leant forward at the desk he was sat, brows down and his mouth parting. Ozai looked slightly less bored than he had been prior to this. Zuko wore the same fascinated expression as Ozai, and Katara was reminded that she hadn't told Zuko about the FBI's cunning plan to catch the aforementioned predator.

Hakoda's daughter blinked slowly and gave a sigh. "At that point I was too tired to be thinking too much about that. I felt safe in my house."

The federal attorney gave a nod, turned his back to her and began pacing. "Miss Marina, why don't your tell the court how you became aware that the defendant had plans to abduct you?" he suggested carelessly.

"The FBI informed me and my father. They requested my help in catching the kidnapper responsible for the eighteen other victims' kidnappings. We agreed and they issued me an ingestible GPS tracker so that when the kidnapper abducted me, I could be traced back to where he was keeping the aforementioned victims and they could be rescued."

"A cunning plan." The attorney commented. "And was that GPS later used for your rescue, and those of the other victims?"

"To my knowledge, yes."

Jonathan Prescott dropped his head into his hands on the desk and stared at Katara in horror, bringing his hand over his mouth in an 'oh shit' expression. His eyes bulged and his now not-so-greasy features were overcome by a sweaty kind of layer. Ozai gave a nod of thought, taking in this new information. He wrote something down on a pad beside him and ran his hand over his mouth pensively.

The federal attorney leant against the desk in front of Katara. "Alright, you were at home. Then what?"

Katara glanced at the attorney apprehensively before continuing. "I went downstairs to make a cup of hot chocolate, and while the kettle was boiling I did some tidying up. When I finished pouring the water into the cup, I turned to get a spoon to stir it. That's when he grabbed me."

Leaning against the desk, the lawyer nodded. "By 'he', I assume you mean the defendant."

"Right."

"And he grabbed you … from the side?"

"From behind." Katara corrected him.

"Alright. Please continue. He grabbed you from behind."

Katara felt her mouth going dry, and she swallowed accordingly, before taking a sigh and blinking slowly. "He covered my mouth when I tried to shout. It didn't matter anyway because there was nobody home. He let go of my mouth to pull something over my head - I assume it was a fabric bag soaked in chloroform - and I struggled blindly, grabbing what I could from the counter. It happened that there was a kitchen knife within reach. He knocked it out of my hand and it fell, cutting my leg in the process. He whispered in my ear as I passed out." She looked down into her lap, noticing her hands fumbling nervously.

"And what did he whisper, Miss Marina?" the lawyer put his hands together in front of him.

Katara put her lower lip between her teeth and drew in a shaky breath, before looking up and clearing her throat. "He shushed me, like you would a child," she explained, as calm as she could. _"Shhhh," _she demonstrated for him.

"_Shhhh." _The attorney repeated, shaking his head. "Were you scared, Miss Marina?"

Katara frowned as if the man before her was out of his mind. "Of course." She stared at him, offended.

The lawyer nodded and then moved away from her, pacing around like some strange kind of animal. "Alright, so at what point did you wake up?"

"Later. I don't know; there weren't any clocks. I guess around four or five in the morning."

"From the testimonies of several witnesses, you were present when the defendant _threw _an infant of less than five weeks old into a brick wall. Did you witness this?"

Katara shook her head pensively. "I heard it, but my back was turned. My hands and feet were bound, I was unable to turn."

"And at what point did you see Jonathan Prescott's face?"

"The next morning, not long before the FBI and local police launched a rescue team to my location."

There was a long silence in which the federal attorney before her gave a puffing sigh of acceptance. He turned - his back had been turned to Katara - and gave Katara a smile she knew was as fake as the Rolex on his wrist. "Thank you, Miss Marina," he spoke genially, before turning back to his desk and taking his seat.

Katara rolled her eyes - maybe she just didn't like feds, because of the Painted Lady. She glanced to Jonathan Prescott, whose face was buried in his hands. She smirked slightly; he had to be feeling like an ass right about now. _'Good' _she told herself. Next to Prescott, Ozai was standing up. Katara caught sight of Ozai glancing back to his son for a moment, before straightening his tie and approaching the bench. He made no attempt to be charming or make buddies with her like the federal lawyer had. Katara decided this was a good thing; Ozai may have been an abusive son of a bitch, but at least he wasn't two-faced.

"Miss Marina, do you believe my client was mentally disoriented during the time you were held against your will?" he asked disinterestedly.

Katara thought on this for a moment; sixteen other girls today had all given the same answer today; 'yes', but now Katara had to think about it. "Well … no. He didn't seem confused at all, to me. He seemed to know what he was doing, even to the point of preparing chloroform for the abductions."

Ozai simply nodded and turned his back to her. "Thank you, Miss Marina." He waved a hand and took his seat.

By now, judging by the demeanor of Jonathan Evan Prescott III, Katara figured he had given up on walking out of this court a free man.

* * *

><p>Zuko found Katara curled up in a ball in a conference room, on a sofa, with her shoes on the floor. He sighed, shut the door and approached the sofa. He sat down next to her, imagining she had to be exhausted after seven hours of this case dragging on. He leant back and propped one arm up on the back of the sofa, the other in his lap.<p>

"Hey." He spoke quietly, his voice a quiet rasp.

Katara lifted her hands and rubbed her face tiredly. "Hey." She answered in exhaustion.

Zuko pulled his mouth to one side in an expression of pity. "Tired?" he wondered aloud.

She nodded silently, hugging her knees closer to her chest, her eyes just peeping over them. She was exhausted; this case had lasted all day, and she'd sat inside, out of the sun for all those seven hours, just waiting for a verdict against a man who'd nearly raped her. She was so tired she was nearly falling asleep on this couch. She'd considered going to sleep in the recess between sessions, but had decided against it.

Zuko cleared his throat and swallowed thoughtfully. "So … why didn't you tell me you were working with the FBI?"

Katara smirked at this. "I was still mad at you for telling Lydia about my suicide attempt. And actually, Toph kind of did tell you. Belly-bug, remember?" she lifted her face from her knees and smirked at him, gloating with her expression.

Zuko breathed an air of amused exasperation. "Belly-bug," he repeated with a pensive nod.

Katara smiled and dropped her feet onto the floor. She leant back against the couch and sighed, looking up to the ceiling, struggling to keep her mind off the case. She shut her eyes and lifted her arms up, her elbows touching the wall behind her and her hands undoing the stately up-do Kelly had arranged for her early this morning. Kelly wasn't a mother, but she was motherly - Katara figured this was from working with children in her line of work.

Zuko's lips allowed a tiny amount of air to escape in his tired blinking. Neither of them had the energy to make conversation, that much was apparent, and it came down to the fact that if they were to speak, it would have to be about something worthwhile, not mindless chit-chat. He realized, with an inward smile, that they were comfortable just sitting here together, without romantic tension or awkwardness.

Katara nodded wearily with a slight smile. The smile disappeared as her hair came free and unfurled on her shoulders and the couch behind her and her eyes fell closed. Zuko had mentioned this morning that he'd given up catching up with his mother to be here with her. Katara wondered why Ursa would come back to an abusive husband, but didn't dwell on it too much. In exhaustion, Katara leant toward Zuko and laid her head on his shoulder. "So … tired," she murmured breathlessly. "I'm gonna fall asleep here," she predicted humorlessly.

Zuko pulled a lopsided frown. "I'm too freaked out to sleep," he ceded thoughtfully. He was telling the truth; when he got home he would be faced with his mother, whom he hadn't seen in three years. He didn't know how he would handle it - after all, in thirty seconds with her they'd concluded that there was much to discuss, and she was quite obviously unnerved by the large scar covering a quarter of his face - especially with all of this case on his shoulders too.

Katara dropped her hand onto his, in his lap. "Don't freak out. She's your _mommy_." She smiled, her eyes shut as she practically read his mind. "This is the lady to made your Halloween costumes when you were little, and wiped your nose when you were in diapers. She's not going to judge you," Katara turned her head so her cheek rested on Zuko's muscular shoulder and murmured into his suit-jacket shoulder, "Even if you are a man-whoring alcoholic chain-smoker." She added with a scoff.

Zuko smiled, looking out into the middle of the room, concluding that Katara and Azula were hanging out way too much. "Thanks Katara," he began with a soft and gentle simper, still a little unsure. "That means a lot to me, especially after all the angst that's been flying between us. For a while there, I thought we were shit in a room full of fans," he joked lethargically, "but somehow we always manage to be friends for a short period before we hit the fan again, like after all that after Lydia faked the pregnancy, at The Aristocrat, we were friends again." Zuko paused and gave a sigh. "Actually, I've been meaning to … talk to you about that."

Katara didn't answer, but stayed against his shoulder. Zuko took this as his cue to go ahead.

"I … don't know if you feel the same way, or if you ever did, but I know I never want to hurt you, ever. And I think that if we were able to stop lying and keeping secrets from one another, we could be happy … together," Zuko stated awkwardly, lifting his free hand to the back of his neck. "What I'm trying to say here is …" Zuko frowned and looked to Katara, lying against his shoulder, with one hand loosely hooked around his wrist on his lap.

She was asleep.

He breathed a sigh of defeat; maybe it was better that she hadn't heard all that mushy shit. Putting his free hand on the one she'd left on his lap, he stroked it with his thumb and turned his head to put his mouth to the smooth skin above her brows, and placed a chaste kiss on her forehead. "Sweet dreams." He murmured, his lips against her mocha skin.

Zuko did eventually fall asleep, even though he'd thought himself unable to do so, and dreamt that hazy dream where you were aware you were dreaming and tried to search your mind for what you wanted to manipulate your dream into, just in time to fly for two seconds before the dream ended. He remembered once he'd had that dream when he was in the mental facility, after attempting suicide, and had marched through his house punching anyone who had ever made him upset before; his father, his teachers, his martial arts teacher (he'd never understood why Ozai had been so hell-bent on his children learning martial arts), and his etiquette teacher. He'd even punched through a mirror at the sight of his own marred face, but he'd eventually come to terms with his appearance, and cherished those who could accept it as he had.

Hakoda entered silently, about half an hour after the two had fallen asleep, and about forty-five minutes after court had been adjourned, expecting his daughter to be curled up on the couch alone, tired and terrified. What he'd seen instead had been Katara curled up against Zuko Scorsese's shoulder in blissful sleep, and Zuko in turn asleep with soft pink lips pressed to Katara's forehead, and a hand cradling hers in his lap. Hakoda hadn't been able to force down the smile on his face, though he knew he couldn't let them sleep for much longer. He waited a minute to just take in the scene before him, but eventually spoke softly, leant against the door with his arms crossed.

"Jury's back."

Zuko's eyes opened slowly, and he blinked for a moment, looking around for a source of the voice. He eventually found Hakoda against the door. He stared for a moment, blinking tiredly, and being careful not to wake Katara. "How long have you been standing there?" he asked, his cheeks taking on a color of deep pink.

Hakoda smiled warmly. "Long enough to know you care a great deal for my daughter."

Zuko gave a nervous smile. "Yes, sir."

Hakoda gave a nod and stopped leaning against the door, dropping his arms and putting his hands in his pockets. "The jury's back with a verdict. Katara will want to be there for it. I think I'll leave her to you." He added with a smile, turning and taking the door handle.

Zuko gave a tired smile as Hakoda disappeared, and proceeded to wake Katara.

* * *

><p>"Madam Foreperson, what say you?" The judge asked from his position over the court.<p>

The African-American woman with a paper in her hands stood from the jury box and began to recite. Katara's breath hitched in her throat, as did the breaths of the entire room, she imagined. Zuko squeezed her hand, both of them on the edges of their seats, ready to jump.

"On the counts of the abduction of Natalia Jenkins in the state of Colorado, and the statutory rape of Natalia Jenkins …

"On the counts of the abduction of Laura Fisher in the state of Colorado, and the statutory rape of Laura Fisher …

"On the counts of the abduction of Amanda Lloyd in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Amanda Lloyd …

"On the counts of the abduction of Bethany Morse in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Bethany Morse …

"On the counts of the abduction of Danielle Walsh in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Danielle Walsh …

"On the counts of the abduction of Tanya Bennett in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Tanya Bennett, and the first-degree murder of Tanya Bennett …

"On the counts of the abduction of Madison Fung in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Madison Fung …

"On the counts of the abduction of Sandra Estevez in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Sandra Estevez …

"On the counts of the abduction of Zoe Carson in the state of New Mexico, and the statutory rape of Zoe Carson …

"On the counts of the abduction of Olivia Brown in the state of Arizona, and the statutory rape of Olivia Brown …

"On the counts of the abduction of Mary-Jane McCoy in the state of Arizona, and the statutory rape of Mary-Jane McCoy …

"On the counts of the abduction of Ellie Richards in the state of Arizona, and the statutory rape of Ellie Richards …

"On the counts of the abduction of Haley West in the state of Arizona, and the statutory rape of Haley West, and the first-degree murder of Haley West …

"On the counts of the abduction of Roxanne Golding in the state of Nevada, and the rape of Roxanne Gold …

"On the counts of the abduction of Charlotte Gordon in the state of Nevada, and the statutory rape of Charlotte Gordon …

"On the counts of the abduction of Tamsin Wade in the state of California, and the statutory rape of Tamsin Wade …

"On the counts of the abduction of Jin Territa in the state of California, and the statutory rape of Jin Territa …

"On the counts of the abduction of Katara Marina in the state of California, and the sexual assault of Katara Marina …"

There was deafening silence, blinding stares and physically painful suspense. The asses of the people in the room were, by now, hovering over their seats like miniature spacecrafts, though one wouldn't be able to imagine little green people stepping out of a person's ass. Ozai, however, was as unscathed as ever. Jonathan Prescott's ass seemed to float the highest, almost emanating a logic-defying counter-gravitational pulse of some kind with his anticipation.

Katara's weight sank into her seat, readying herself to jump at the verdict, and she felt her hand beginning to sweat, so she took it from Zuko to wipe on her suit trousers. She lifted her dry hand and ran it over her mouth in anxiety, her eyes wide and her lips parted as her fingers brushed over them. _'Guilty, guilty, guilty' _chanted the mantra in her head, steadily getting louder, having started at a whisper, but now a deafening chant like that 'Pie Iesu Domine-THWACK' sketch in 'Monty Python's The Holy Grail'.

"We the jury …"

Katara lifted a hand to her head and pushed back her now undone hair from her face, the suspense literally choking her. Zuko swallowed the dry feeling in his throat and eyed the female foreperson impatiently. This meant a lot to Katara, and he knew it. Sokka leant forward with a dark expression on his face, and Hakoda did the same. Zuko imagined this was what the O.J. Simpson verdict must've felt like.

"Find the defendant, Jonathan Evan Prescott III …"

Katara made a subtle noise of anxious suspense, both hands taking firm grip of the wood bench beneath her, fingernails digging into the wood varnish. Zuko wanted to reach out to her, but at this point, he imagined any human contact would only irritate her. _"Come on. Come __**on …**__" _he could practically hear her thoughts, begging that woman to finish her words.

"… _**Guilty."**_

Katara leapt to her feet, fully expecting to look stupid as the only person to do so, but the entire courtroom chorused with her, rising to their feet and shouting and screaming celebrations of 'hallelujah' and 'thank god', and Katara heard gasps and yells of the first joy on the tongues of Jonathan Prescott's victims. Katara felt a massive, welling smile that began in her stomach spread onto her stomach as tears formed in her eyes. "Oh my god!" she cried out helplessly, her hands taking the back of the seat in front of her. "Oh my god!" she repeated in disbelief, before smacking her hand to her mouth, her sound of her voice long lost in the crowd's celebrations.

The judge clapped the gavel on the desk to calm the court, but nothing could be done. It was like telling people in a movie theater to stay in their seats to see the credits rolling. Katara turned to her left and grabbed her brother, who was also on his feet whooping, around the shoulders and hugged him tightly. He gripped her fiercely, unable to give Zuko a glare in his euphoria. Katara then moved to her father, just squeezing past Sokka to get to him and hugged him too. Zuko would've liked be someone Katara wanted to hug right now, but he was content just standing there and taking in the happiness in the room.

* * *

><p>Later that night, much later that night, Ozai Scorsese and Hakoda Marina sat out on the balcony adjoining Ozai's office, on two stone armchairs, each holding a glass of straight whiskey, the bottle on the wooden table between them. Ozai puffed on the cigar in his left hand every so often - he wasn't a heavy smoker, but liked a cigar with his victories - and looked out to the city with a thoughtful expression on his face.<p>

"If you don't mind my saying," Hakoda cleared his throat, adjusting his position in his seat. "That was the most subtle of thrown cases I've ever witnessed."

Ozai nodded at this. "It was a case not even I could win. I didn't have to try," he explained, before lifting his cigar to his mouth and dragging out a long breath of smoke. "The media had already dragged Prescott's name through the papers, the jury pool was influenced long before the man came to me."

Hakoda brought a hand to his mouth and used his thumb to wipe at a little bit of whiskey on his upper lip. "Why'd you take the case, if you didn't believe the man was innocent?"

Ozai glanced aside to Hakoda and gave a humorless laugh, before removing his cigar from his mouth. "What does it matter," he began coldly - he was always cold - with a dark undertone to his voice. "Justice was done today. That is all that matters."

Hakoda gave a weak smile. "I wasn't questioning your motives, Scorsese, I was merely pondering on why a man of your stature would care for the wellbeing of the nineteen girls - including my daughter - that Jonathan Prescott abducted."

"I don't." Ozai rebutted calmly. "I have a daughter of my own. Perhaps I was projecting."

Hakoda nodded in agreement, bringing his glass to his lips and taking a sip. "Even you would crack a smile at what I saw today." Hakoda exhaled after taking a sip.

"Enlighten me."

Hakoda drew his cell phone from his pocket and tapped a few buttons, before passing it over the table where the bottle of whiskey sat, to Ozai. Ozai put his glass down to take the phone while smoking on his cigar. Ozai gave it a quick once-over and scoffed a humorless laugh that Hakoda knew meant Ozai found this amusing. The picture of Zuko and Katara curled up on the couch was shown in the screen of Hakoda's phone when Ozai handed it back. Ozai handed over his own phone with it, confusing Hakoda somewhat.

"Send that to mine - I imagine my wife would like to see that."

Hakoda nodded and took both phones, before going through the procedure of 'Bluetoothing' that Sokka had taught him. "I didn't know your wife had returned," Hakoda spoke in distraction, as he fiddled with the phones. "When did she get back?"

"Last night." Ozai ceded thoughtfully, lifting his glass again and taking a heavy sip. "I don't know why she came back, she's either not right in the head or too right in the heart."

Hakoda slid Ozai's phone across the table between them, and Ozai stopped it with the hand that held the cigar, before putting the cigar in his mouth and lifting the phone, slipping it into the pocket of his suit jacket. "I hate to be blunt, but we're not going to become friends, are we?" Hakoda chuckled in amusement.

Ozai smirked in equal amusement. "Good god, I hope not."

* * *

><p>After the conviction, Katara was unsure what her next goal was. She knew she needed to avenge her mother's murder, but she was waiting for that. She wondered for a short while what she was waiting for, but the best she could come up with was Zuko. She was waiting for Zuko. Zuko she knew she could trust to help her with her revenge, but there had to be something else she was waiting for; she knew it.<p>

Katara sighed as she stood out on her balcony, with a Budweiser in her hand. She couldn't help but be reminded of New Years' Eve, when she and Sokka had been drinking together on this very balcony, discussing the finer details of her relationship with Jet, the conversation ending with 'let's go get pissed at Zuko's'. Katara dipper her head down and pinched the bridge of her nose.

'_Cactus juice.' _She thought to herself. _'By brother is addicted to peyote.'_

She couldn't help but blame herself; after all, Sokka had only become an avid drinker after her abduction, and now, by the smell of the green stuff in the coke bottle Sokka had hidden in his underwear drawer, he had taken to hallucinogens. She hadn't been going through his drawer; she'd been returning his laundry, only to stumble upon the cactus juice. She'd need to speak to Jet - after all, she only knew what peyote juice smelt like because he'd tried to offer the stuff to her when they'd been dating - about all this.

"_**Realeeeeaase me, releeeease mah body, I knoooooow it's wrong, so why am I with you now? I said releeeeeeease me, 'cause Iiiii'm not able to, conviiiiince myself, that I'm better off without you-,"**_

Katara's face sported a bright red blush and she grabbed her phone from her pocket. Toph had obviously been in her room for way too much time the morning prior to their shopping trip, and had apparently changed the ringtone for Zuko's call from that solid guitar riff to … _this. _She guessed this was because Toph knew Katara was 'totally head-over-ass in love with Sparky', as the Blind Bandit had put it.

Katara thwacked her thumb into the green symbol on the touch screen and lifted the phone to her ear. "Hello?" she asked curiously.

"_Hey." _Zuko's voice rasped at the other end of the line.

Katara found herself thinking about that guy at the coffee shop, how his smile had made her feel girlish and giggly, and about Ty Lee's mention of the rumor about Zuko's 'ability'. Zuko's voice right now was enough to make her smile and blush immediately, and brought on a different feeling to the one the guy at the coffee shop had. Katara felt confidence flowing into her at the sound of his voice, with the knowledge that she could say anything she wanted to the person on the other end.

"Hey." Katara replied with an impish smile, bringing the Budweiser to her lips. "Thought you'd be busy catching up with your mom."

"_I am. Or, I was." _Zuko answered calmly, and by the tone of his voice, Katara was sure he was doing that nervous smile he did when he was about to ask for something. _"It's late, and she's jetlagged, so she went to bed."_

Katara checked her watch to see that it was four minutes past midnight. "Hey, Zuko, check your watch."

There was a silent pause as Zuko did so, before he laughed on the line and answered. _"Four Past Midnight." _He replied with an amused chuckle. 'Four Past Midnight' was a book by Stephen King, with a few short stories in it, much like 'Hearts In Atlantis', and the newest book 'Full Dark, No Stars'. _"So, what are you up to?"_

Katara drew in a long breath and then sighed.

"_That doesn't sound good."_

"It isn't." Katara shook her head, though he couldn't tell over the phone. "Sokka … I found cactus juice in Sokka's room. Peyote. I think he got it from Jet."

"_Well, that's fucked up."_

"No shit, Sherlock." Katara laughed humorlessly. "I think I want to get out of here." She turned around on the balcony and stared at her house for a moment, leaning against the rail.

Zuko laughed. _"That's good."_

"It is?"

"_The Blue Spirit is going for a little expedition tonight. Would the Painted Lady care to join him?"_

Katara grinned and took a glance at the empty bottle in her hand. She turned around and hurled the bottle across the suburban paradise, grinning as it smashed against the side of a house. Someone yelled angrily, but Katara ignored it. "You bet your ass she would."

* * *

><p><strong>AN: This chapter is dedicated to Dawnoftheredsand, who's created a stunning piece of artwork for Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates. It took my breath away and now I'm even beginning to get misty-eyed. The piece is called 'Fanfic Katara' and it's on deviantArt. Please don't get lazy on my guys, if the link doesn't work, search up the username (remember the capitol D), Please, for the love of all that is Zutarian!**

**.com/?qh=§ion=&q=Dawnoftheredsand#/d419ug3**

**Coulda split this into two bits, but I didn't. The first half would've been WAY too depressing. I read over this counting the characters and guess what? IT WAS OVER NINE THOUSAND! LOL! I love you guys for reading and reviewing and staying true, and I promise this is going old-school again! Remember the happy days back when the Painted Lady was 'grinding' on the Blue Spirit? And when Zuko and Katara were blowing chunks at his house on New Years'? Well, I know I don't have future chapter to PREview, so instead we're going to be REviewing some of the best moments of LILAM and LILABOC! YAY! So, first series, you got PREviews, This series we'll get REviews, and then in season Three I'll hafta figure out what to do!**

**I'm loving making Ozai a good guy ^_^**

**Okay, so here's our very first REVIEW of one of my favorite moments in LILABOC!**

* * *

><p>Sokka shook his head, letting an equal grin grow on his face and grabbing a champagne bottle from the drinks table. He shook it with one hand and popped off the cap, directing the explosive foam at the two drunkards on the floor. With a shout of surprise, Zuko rolled onto Katara.<p>

"I'll protect you!" he joked, leaning over her on all fours. The liquid was however, unavoidable. Katara laughed up at him, shoving him off of her.

* * *

><p><strong>Aww! Remember the days when there was less sexual tension? More physical contact -winkwink-? Oh, those were the days. Oh, and remember the Stephen King references? I'm bringing 'em back, because lately I've been like MAI! This big BLUGH! HAVEN'T I? Well that's gonna change, I promise. Every chappy is going to be a happy-chappy from now on. To some degree. We can't get rid of ALL the angst, now can we? ;-)<strong>

**REVIEW, my wonderful, wonderful readers! Thank you guys for keeping me going with all the love you've been sending! It really helped me get through that rough patch back there! I LUFFS YOO!**


	6. Silver Sandwich

The Painted Lady couldn't contain her glee at being free again, as she kicked her new, much lighter leather boot into the stomach of a security guard. After all, raiding the mall had to have some benefits, right? So long as Katara Marina wouldn't be recognized. She didn't plan on wearing the boots outside of her criminal activity anyhow.

The guard went reeling backward into a glass window that she stalked towards. "Oh, now, _these_ are pretty," she smirked, lifting a small velvet pad with diamond earrings on them. They were simple, just teardrops on inch-long silver chains, but they looked expensive. "Shame I can't take them with me." She dropped the pad onto the unconscious security guard and turned her head to the sound of Zuko's combat boots on broken glass. She walked toward the Blue Spirit until she was chest-to-chest with him.

"This isn't a raid, K-,"

"Codenames, please. I have no intention of going to jail. Do you?" Katara lifted a hand and patted him on the shoulder.

Zuko rolled his eyes inside his mask and shook his head. "We were just supposed to rob _that _store." He lifted a gloved hand and pointed to 'Gun World', which was looking quite pitiful at the moment, with one smashed window, the metal thieving-shields sliced open with Dao swords. The Blue Spirit patted the pouch of ammo on his hip to illustrate his point.

Katara patted his shoulder again and turned around to look about. The mall was eerie at night, with all the lights off. "Guess that plan's fucked," she murmured thoughtfully, looking around. "Besides, I didn't rob Tiffany's, I just broke the window. Those earrings are worth enough to get that fixed."

"And the boots?"

"They were on sale. I didn't even break anything in that store, I picked the lock." She shrugged disinterestedly, looking around warily. "Is it just me or should there be more security guards?" she turned and looked over her shoulder, putting her hands on her hips, on the tops of the thigh holsters of her new twin Berretta ninety-twos. She'd have to remember to sand down the numbers on the gun when she got home. The Glocks were nice, but she knew they were traceable, and the Berettas had just been singing to her from their place in the case marked 'specials' in a room with an extremely hard lock to pick.

The Blue Spirit frowned within his mask, and his accomplice knew him well enough to know so. "Yeah …" he spoke, obviating his suspicion on the silence surrounding them. He reached over his own shoulder and wrapped his black glove around the handles of both his swords. "I think we should get out of here," he advised his comrade thoughtfully, looking up to the rope they'd used to get into the building, as the entrance/exit doors were heavily blocked and wired.

"Good idea," The Painted Lady concurred, approaching the rope and taking it in one hand and tugging it to test its strength. Much to her horror, the rope came down like a dancing snake dying in the middle of its routine. She snapped her gaze to her cohort with a mortified expression on the lower half of her face.

"That's not good." Zuko approached her and knelt before the loose spool of rope. He lifted the end of the thick line and saw that it had been cut through with a knife, judging by the way it was minimally frayed and flared the way hair is when you cut it with a knife - Zuko knew, once having cut of his long ponytail when he was young, with a knife he'd found in a box of his grandfather's old trinkets from the war. He stood and gave his accomplice a glance through his mask.

Just by his silence, she knew he was telling her they needed t get out of here, and fast. She looked to her left to see a computer store, and lifted one of her Berettas from her left holster and shot through the lock at the bottom of the door. "Follow me," she instructed him, grabbing the bottom of the theft-shield and tugging it up with one hand, the other holding a gun at her side. She walked into the darkness and shot through an Apple computer, wincing. "Oh, sweet Mac, your death will not be in vain." She approached the table, patting the dead computer.

"Oh, great, you're an Apple Mac nut." The Blue Spirit huffed in annoyance. "If you love 'em so much, why the fuck did you shoot it?"

Katara looked over he shoulder while holstering her gun. "Apple invented the idea and paid Bill Gates to develop it. He sold the concept to BMI, and sold Apple out to the larger company, and Apple is _**still **_better! Not to mention-."

The Blue Spirit lifted his hands and made a show of putting his fingers in his ears, through the hood of his ninja suit. "Lalalalalalaaa…" he sang at a low tone.

With a roll of the eyes and a wave of dismissal, the Painted Lady turned back to the computer. "Windows can suck it," she murmured under her breath, sliding a leather-clad finger between the skeleton of the computer and the outer shell, splitting it apart further.

Outside the store, Katara heard guards yelling in the distance, and she was sure she caught the light of a flashlight in her peripheral vision.

Zuko approached and stood unnervingly close behind her, watching what she was doing over her shoulder. His silence asked what she was doing, as he lifted a hand to her shoulder and drew in a wanton breath, his thumb grazing her black-clad back in a manner less than chaste.

Katara's breath hitched in her throat and she stiffened immediately. _'Zuko, what are you doing?' _was what came to mind, but she dared not say his name aloud, a) because she didn't want to go to jail and get lesbian-raped, and b) because a big part of the thrill of being the Painted Lady was the Blue Spirit being just that. She looked over her shoulder at him. "I'm trying to concentrate …" she heard her voice waver and hated herself for it. She looked back to the computer components and proceeded to put the pieces together in the way Toph had shown her.

The Blue Spirit gave a single laugh to the clinging air between them and leant closer to see what she was trying to do with the computers, his chest coming flush against her back. Katara heard him breathing inside his mask with an amused smirk. A shiver ran up her spine and she felt a red-hot blush on her cheeks, and something _else, _below the waistline.

She gave a little gasp of surprise at the subtle twitch her 'lower' nerves had just given and she gripped the top of the computer in front of her to balance her thoughts again. Zuko laughed again in his mask and Katara bit her lip, looking down at the components in her fingers, as she assembled the earpieces Toph had taught her how to assemble the morning after their sleepover. She grabbed the handy pliers at her side and tried her best to concentrate.

Zuko's free hand went to her hip from behind her and she gave a grunt, half of annoyance and half of frustration. His eyes wandered lower down her back as he pulled away, though keeping his hands on her shoulder and hip. Golden eyes through a blue mask fell on an amazing leather-clad ass, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't want to know what it would feel like in his hand.

Katara suddenly turned around and swatted away his hands away, extending in her hand a prototype-like, miniature contraption with a microphone on a stiff wire extending out to where Zuko's mouth would be when he put it on. "Here, plug this in your ear. We'll need a com-link for my escape plan." The Blue Spirit extended an open hand and she dropped one of the earpieces into, before carefully hooking the contraption into her ear and pressing it in a little to make sure it didn't fall out. "And if I ever catch you doing that again - staring at my ass like that and eyeing me like some piece of meat - I'll relieve you of the need to jerk off." She patted the gun on her thigh and glared at him threateningly.

Zuko smirked inside his mask while slipping his intercom into his ear. "Everything up until 'of the need to jerk off' sounded great." He commented shamelessly.

"Stop with the flirting!" Katara hissed darkly. "Listen close, because I'm only going to say this once. I'm going to run, and you stay here all tied up like I betrayed you. The police like you better, y'know, because you _didn't _rob a jewelry store and make them look like halfwits- wait, scratch the last one … Anyway, they'll eventually decide the only person who can stop me getting away is you, and let you go after me. That's the best case scenario."

Zuko adjusted his intercom in his ear. "And the worst case scenario?"

The Painted Lady thought about this for a moment. "You end up stuck here on your own, having to fight off an entire squad of police and security guards." She lifted a hand to her chin carelessly.

With a breath of annoyance, the Blue Spirit pointed a finger toward his accomplice. "Here's an idea, how about _I _tie _you _up and leave _you_ to figure it out?" he threatened seriously, before crossing his arms over his chest. "And anyway, we don't even know if we'll be able to get out through the main doors," he hissed darkly; this expedition wasn't going too well.

Katara looked past the Blue Spirit and saw the light of a flashlight steadily coming closer. She grabbed Zuko's arm. "New plan!" she shout-whispered, tugging him out _toward _the light.

"What are you doing?" Zuko planted his feet inside the computer store and pulled his arm out of her grip.

She turned to stare at him. "If we stay in here they'll have us cornered, dumbass!" she yelled at him, grabbing his wrist and dragging him out of the computer store. She let go of him once they were in the large plaza of the mall. In the distance, she could hear the mob of security guards and police officers yelling in excitement at the sound of her voice. Tilting her head up, she saw the hole in the glass ceiling where they'd slid into the mall.

The Blue Spirit lifted the spool of rope off the floor and tousled it in his fingers, looking up also. "Looks like up is the only way out," he murmured in his mask, only loud enough for Katara to hear, thanks to the com-link she'd put together. What he would give for a grapple at the end of this rope; he knew Katara was a hell of a pitcher from the times they'd played baseball, and she could get a grapple anywhere she liked with skills like that. He wondered if her aiming skills when pitching attributed to her skill with her guns; after all, as far as he knew she had never actually learnt to shoot straight.

"Up or down." Katara mused thoughtfully.

He snapped his head to her, craning his head as if he were squinting at her in disbelief. _"Down?" _he repeated incredulously.

"Sewers."

Zuko snarled at the idea. "Over my dead body."

"If we hang around here much longer, we might be able to arrange that," she put her hands on her hips and put her weight on one leg, standing aside in annoyance. Katara looked over her shoulder and saw the light getting more intense. They were getting closer. "Think fast, Blue. Up, Down, or option three?"

The Blue Spirit tilted his head and uncrossed his arms. "Option three?"

The lower half of the Painted Lady's face curled into a smirk, shifting from her casual stance into a shameless, prowling stalk. "We fight them off."

"If up is option one, down is option two and _right through _is option three, there's only one way to decide who gets to choose." The Blue Spirit approached Katara and held his palm out flat, putting his fist in his palm.

Katara put her hands the same. On three, they smacked their fists on their palms three times and then extended their right hands in 'scissor' symbols. They brought their hands back to their palms the same time they heard resounding clicks and boots squeaking on the tiles of the mall floor.

"Put your hands in the air!" two men yelled at once.

Katara and Zuko continued their silent game of rock-paper-scissors with the simple sounds of 'smack-smack-smack-draw'. Both of the legendary vigilantes held their hands out flat, both having drawn 'paper' on one another. They rolled their eyes with a breath of exasperation and went again.

"Did you hear us? Hands in the air!" one of the police officers yelled out. "Now!"

Another officer stepped forward, Katara would've recognized him as Ted Millhouse if she'd been looking, and addressed them "Do you intend to resist arrest?" he asked calmly.

If she weren't enveloped in her game with Zuko, she'd have paid attention and maybe even cracked a smile before admitting that they did in fact intend to resist arrest. Smack-smack-smack-draw.

"Yes!" she grinned, holding out 'paper' as her accomplice held out 'rock'. "Option three, here we come." She stood straighter and glanced to the group of police. "Oh, sorry, didn't see you there." She waved a hand amicably, shifting her weight seductively to one leg. She eyed the one who'd been yelling at them. He was a small man, not in the sense than he was short or weak or even small-minded, but he was petty and she could see it in his eyes.

The Blue Spirit turned to face them and saw the leader - he presumed the man in the front was the leader, as he'd been shouting as if his life had depended on it - licking dry lips at the sight of Katara with her hand on that curvy leather-clad hip of hers. Jealous protectivity welled in Zuko's stomach like a heavy, day-old rice ball you picked out of your Chinese food the morning after you'd ordered it.

"Well?" The Painted Lady pursed luscious, red-painted lips seductively. "Aren't you going to try and arrest us?" she tilted her head aside, revealing a smooth, slender neck above the turtleneck, short-sleeved black sweater she wore. It was really too hot to be wearing it, but beneath it she only wore a black, lacy bra that she was sure would add 'indecent exposure' to her long and growing list of crimes.

"Put your ha- hands up over your head and stand with your feet shoulder-width apart." The middle one instructed them adamantly.

Katara put her hands up and stood with her legs apart - just a little further apart than 'shoulder-width' - in her new wedge-heeled boots. "Want me to bend over too?" she teased aloud, bringing the faces of all the police and security guards to sport bright red blushes starting below their eyes, spreading to their ears and misting down their necks.

The Blue Spirit's jealousy was tightening in his stomach as he held up his own hands and went along with Katara's big idea. She was obviously still playing, stalling them, or whatever she wanted to call it. They weren't fighting yet. He had a feeling that with her the fighting didn't begin until grinding and dirty-mouthed flirting had failed her. He noted how close his hands were to the hilts of his broadswords and felt a smirk wash over his face within his mouth.

"Take off the masks, right now." The officer demanded, his gun getting slippery in the sweat of his palms.

The Painted Lady glanced sideways to look at her accomplice. "Oh look, Blue, he wants me to get undressed," she smirked humorously, dropping her hands and putting them on her hips again, remarkably close to her new Berrettas. She mentally admired them again; she nearly drooled at the memory of the gold finish on them. In some far corner of her mind she wondered why a simple gun store held such a fine specimen of armory. Then again, the case she'd found them in had said 'specials', and they'd been in a highly locked-up room. "Are you jealous yet?"

The Blue Spirit didn't drop his hands but wrapped one around the hilts of his swords and drew both out with a satisfying, resounding, slicing noise. Katara took this as a 'Yes' to her question, and smacked her hands onto her guns, pulling them from her thighs and aiming them in a split moment. Zuko split his swords from one another and bared them challengingly. He wondered how Katara had learnt to draw like that, and aim the way she did, when she was merely a fifteen-year-old girl. Then again, he was just a seventeen-year-old guy, so he guessed it made sense. In this town you had to know how to defend yourself.

"Let's dance, bitch," Katara eyed the lead police officer offensively.

He fired a shot at her as a result of this, aiming for her stomach but missing terribly. Katara cringed angrily at this; the man had obviously been going for what he imagined to be a 'soft-spot', due to having been shot in the stomach before. By the way he bared his teeth she saw right through him; he was a disrespectful, loudmouthed, cocky son of a bitch, the same kind that went to bars looking to buy enough drinks for a girl to make her feel obligated to sleep with him. Katara fired a shot with her left gun that whizzed past his right ear as a warning, distracting him by making him look over that shoulder, as she pulled the trigger on her right gun, shooting right through his left shoe, through his foot and into the tile floor.

The man screamed hoarsely and tugged his leg up, clutching his foot in both hands and dropping his standard-issue gun to the floor, and allowing it to slide across the floor toward the Painted Lady and Blue Spirit. Katara considered picking up the gun, but it was nowhere near as nice as her Berrettas. At the onomatopoeic sound of a bullet on metal, followed by an annoyed grunt on Zuko's part, Katara looked over her shoulder to see Zuko looking down through his mask at a scratch on his sword. With surprise, she realized he had deflected a bullet with his _sword._

"Hey, look out!" he yelled at her, the first words he'd rasped out since they'd been in the presence of the police.

Katara turned her head back to the police and allowed her eyes to widen as she instinctively moved to her right, a bullet ripping past her shoulder, so close it had left a stripe of a hole in the minimal sleeve of her black, short-sleeved, turtleneck sweater. "Ah!" she gasped, horrified as she looked to the gun that had fired that bullet. They'd ripped her lovely sweater-shirt! She tried to decipher which gun had fired that bulled so she could shoot them in the nuts, but only realized they all had their guns up.

"Drop your weapons!" the new leader yelled, a much younger man with tattoos all over his bare arms.

Katara counted the remaining men in the group. Six. Well, with firearms, they were definitely outnumbered. Hand-to-hand, she knew she and the Blue Spirit could take them on, but right now that didn't look like an option. _'Fuck,' _her mind screamed at her. How could she have been so stupid? She should've just gone with Zuko for an escape. The Painted Lady gave the Blue Spirit an apologetic glance that he regarded with simple silence. She hadn't expected otherwise.

He put his swords together and held them in one hand, sheathing them and dropping his hands to his sides. She followed suit and put her guns in their holsters, holding her hands up over her head, away from them to show surrender. Only a few minutes later did she realize he hadn't put his swords away to surrender.

The Blue Spirit laughed at her in his mask and gripped in one hand something from his belt, pulling it off his person and tossing it at the floor. The Painted Lady jumped as a cloud of gray smoke appeared between them and the police officers, with a popping explosion of the dust-pellets he had thrown down. Zuko scooped down and grabbed the spool of rope from the floor, finding the end and holding it in one hand as he grabbed the police officer's gun and began tying it at the end of the rope. When he was sure it was tied on securely, he swung it around to test, looking up at the glass ceiling and listening to the police yell in confusion.

He tossed up the gun and it fired a shot as it hooked around one of the white-painted metal beams holding up the glass ceiling-roof. He tugged it again to test its strength and dubbed it stable enough to hold his weight, and the Painted Lady's. He grabbed his accomplice's arm and pulled her toward the rope, silently ushering her to climb up first. She shook her head, disallowing herself to speak in the fog of smoke, in case she gave the police officers a clue as to where they were. In exasperation, he grabbed the rope with both hands and began clambering up it like some black, blue and white version of Donkey-Kong.

Katara grabbed it after him and began climbing up, a three foot distance between his feet and her head as they climbed. It was a high ceiling, twenty to twenty-five feet high, and it was a long climb up, but both held the strength to complete the climb. The dust was beginning to clear by the time the Blue Spirit grabbed one of the white metal beams. He held onto the rope with one hand, the muscles in his upper arm bulging as he did, to punch a new hole in the glass above them. The glass shattered and cracked open in a hole the size of his fist, and he punched a few more times, spreading the hole big enough for him to climb through, and Katara behind him, up toward the gray and swirling sky as it poured rain down onto them.

Reaching out and grabbing through the hole, his fingers dipped into a ridge and he used it to begin pulling himself through the hole, careful to avoid the sharp, jagged edges of the glass. Katara's leather-clad hand nearly let the rope slip from her hands when another bullet came remarkably close to fatally wounding her, whizzing past her stomach, ripping a long strip in her sweater-shirt and sliding against her skin at a speed so fast it had left a hot, stinging, red graze on her skin beneath the sweater. At her panic, the rope gave a groan and the gun attached as a grappling hook slid against the white metal beam it was hooked over, threatening to unhinge from it.

She cried out in horror as the gun scraped with a whine against the beam and wiggled a little, wanting to let her drop to the floor below. The Painted Lady watched in horror as the gun came unhooked from the beam and she began to fall. "No!" she screamed out, terrified, letting go of the falling rope and grabbing for the beam closest to her, her legs flailing desperately. Her forearm made contact with something that tightened around her wrist. She squeezed her hand around it just the same, staring up with wide eyes.

The Blue Spirit had caught her by the wrist, and she had her hand around his in turn. The journey of a thousand miles started with a single step, she remembered him saying. If they were taking steps, he'd just taken a fucking _leap. _

"Don't let me go!" she yelled at him in panic, looking up at him with searching cerulean eyes, rain spilling from the skies through into the mall, onto her face.

The grinning mask said nothing, but the voice within it replied solemnly. "Never." He promised, reaching down with his other arm and grabbing just below where his first hand clutched her, beginning to pull her up as the rain hit the back of his hooded head mercilessly.

She grabbed one of her guns with her free hand and aimed it down at the police below, as Zuko pulled her up. She fired a few shots at them, one of them splicing through a thigh, and then holstered her weapon again, bullets returning fire mercilessly, and flying so close she could feel the heat of them. It was torturous helplessness. Somehow, Zuko tugged her through the hole without getting her anywhere the jagged, broken glass, and she went careening into him, chest to chest, on the pitched roof.

He fell backwards, her on top of him as his back his the thick glass. He was reminded of how his back had hit the door earlier, when Sokka had punched him in the face, as the two went rolling down the slope of the roof, rolling on top and beneath one another with little, stifled grunts and breaths as they hit the glass and tumbled atop their counterpart. They came to a halt in the dip between one pitch roof and the next, Katara on top of Zuko, the side of her masked face against his chest. She forced out a winded breath at the same time as him.

"Next time …" Zuko panted, "I get to choose … which option … we go with … okay?" his chest rose and fell beneath Katara, as the rain pelted their skin.

She rolled off him onto her back, next to him, panting just the same. "Mm-hmm," she agreed, between hard breaths, shutting her eyes in her mask.

* * *

><p>By the time they got out of the area in which they were being hunted, it was quarter past six in the morning and there was no point in going to sleep because it would just throw off their body clocks. The night would have to be an all-nighter. They slipped into the attic of the aging Scorsese mansion and shut the skylight behind themselves, their feet hitting the floor with quiet thumps that probably sounded like lightning from inside the living areas. A storm was brewing in the skies anyway; it wouldn't be too hard to believe in this rain.<p>

Katara pulled her hair free as soon as the skylight was shut and dropped the band that had once secured her thick, dark brown locks to the soft pile of stained throw cushions, covered by an ancient old blanket. She grabbed the bottom of her sweater and pulled it off over her head, revealing that black, lacy bra she hadn't wanted to reveal at the mall, and glancing down over the soft wells of firm flesh inside the bra to a weeping cut on her stomach. It was stinging badly. She gave a hiss of pain.

Zuko had had his back to her as she'd done this, and was taking his mask off to breathe in some cool air, rather than the sweaty, humid air he got while wearing that damned mask. He dropped the wooden mask next to Katara's shirt and pushed back his hood, his hand ruffling his damp hair. The hood had stopped most of the rain from getting to his hair, but not all of it. He turned to see Katara in her bra, letting her wet hair down.

He suddenly wished he were wearing the mask again, because a blush grew on his face like fire does on a haystack. Then he realized the reason she had taken her shirt off; a cut across her stomach was weeping, and beginning to bleed. It wasn't a deep cut, but Zuko was surprised to realize how close she had come to getting shot right through the stomach, side-to-side. "How bad is it?" he asked tentatively, quietly.

"It stings," she admitted at a whisper, ruffling her wet hair to dry it with one hand, and using two fingers to wipe at the blood beginning to weep from her toned abdomen. The blood had already begun, and a thin driblet rolled down her skin, until it stopped in the hollow of her belly button, five inches below the actual slice.

Zuko began to pull off the wet top of his black combat attire as he next spoke. "I'll find you some bandages," he promised, pulling it over his head and holding it up by the shoulders so it could dry. He draped it over his grandmothers ancient mirror and then pulled off the tight undershirt sticking to his abs, tossing it to the pile where his mask and Katara's top lay, before roughly pulling open a drawer of the aging vanity at his left, finding some old bandages unused, from the wartime his grandfather Azulon had known. It was old bandaging, but it was bandaging nonetheless.

He approached Katara, who was looking at him with a thankful smile, and held the bandaging roll in one hand, reaching around her waist with both and pulling the length around her back. He used both hands to wrap it around her three or four times, before he took the safety pin from inside the role to secure the bandaging around his friend's slender stomach. He dropped the bandage roll to the floor to clip one end of the bandaging to the rest, keeping it all neat and tidy. He looked up to her face with a brief smile that she returned gracefully.

Katara's eyes fell on the cut on his lower lip, from where Sokka had punched him earlier. Actually, she supposed, Sokka had punched him yesterday, since it was six in the morning the next day. She lifted her hand and put two fingers to his lower lip, touching the dried blood. "I'm sorry." She murmured apologetically.

Zuko shook his head and frowned stoically. "Don't be. It wasn't your fault," he noted solemnly.

"Yeah, but-," she stopped herself short at the sound of creaking a few feet past Zuko, who was facing her. The hatch from below opened and someone stepped up into the attic with a look of surprise on their face. Katara didn't realize why the person was so surprised until she realized that she was shirtless and so was Zuko, and she was dripping wet, and her hair was all out and loose and stuff … It didn't look too good.

The scarred teen looked over his shoulder and saw his mother's surprised expression changing into one of amusement; condescending amusement, but amusement nonetheless. He gasped in surprised and then turned to face his mother, holding his hands up innocently. "Gah! It's not what it looks like!" he felt his face turn red, and he kept his mouth open to say more, but his mother cut him off.

Ursa smirked. "How do you know? To me it looks like there's a masked woman in the attic not wearing a shirt while standing remarkably close to my also shirtless son. Are you telling me it's not that?"

Zuko gave a nervous frown. "No!" he promised, before rebutting himself and smacking a hand to his forehead. "I mean yes. But that's all it is. It's just a string of coincidences." He lowered his voice and gave a sigh of defeat, allowing himself to accept that his mother was playing mind-fuck with him.

Katara also gave a nervous smile to the woman and lifted a hand in an awkward wave.

Ursa gave a sigh of amusement and shook her head. "I'm not going to ask what the Blue Spirit and Painted Lady have been doing tonight. I'll see it on the news later." She waved a hand dismissively. "In the meanwhile, you both look in desperate need of warm, dry clothes, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee."

Zuko and Katara decided that was exactly what they needed.

* * *

><p>A few hours later in the day, half an hour past eleven, as the sun was coming out and the rain stopped, Katara and Zuko had planned to meet Aang and Toph in the mall, at the coffee shop. Katara had forgotten about the blonde guy that worked there in the fugue of the prior night, and the return of her worries for her brother. They sat at a table and waited for Toph and Aang, looking out the window at the mess of glass in the centre of the plaza, being photographed by police and scrutinized by crime scene investigators, and people standing around the yellow 'do not cross' tape, trying to get a look at the scene that the Painted Lady and Blue Spirit had left.<p>

"Oh, by the way, I found a hole in the heel of one of my new boots," Katara noted with a laugh, now changed out of her Painted Lady attire and wearing some clothes that Azula had been more than happy to lend; a black pair of skinny-jeans and a tight red spaghetti-strap vest, and some red sneakers that didn't fit anymore. Katara's hair was styled in two loose braids, one of which fell on her shoulder, and the other that fell down to the small of her back. A few shorter strands fell in front of her face.

Zuko turned his head to look at her quizzically, before realizing she was talking about her stolen boots from last night, and he figured she meant she'd found a bullet hole in one of the wedge heels. "You got lucky last night." He told her seriously. She'd come remarkably close to getting shot at least three times; on the arm, in the stomach, in the foot …

Katara nodded in agreement, looking out the window to the people milling around the scene they'd left. "Last night was epic," she smirked.

"Yeah, right up until the Painted Lady nearly got shot out of mid-air," he answered dryly, his eyes narrowing as a shadow fell over the table. He looked up and saw a blonde boy about a year older than him wearing a green apron and holding a pad of paper and a pen and looming over them.

"Hey." The blonde smiled at Katara.

Katara snapped her gaze from the scene outside the coffee store to Nathan. "Oh, hey, Nathan." She smiled calmly. "Hear anything about the raid last night?"

Nathan shrugged thoughtfully. "Not really. So, what can I get you?"

"I'll take a cappuccino."

He wrote down on the paper and then smiled briefly at Zuko. "And you?"

Zuko considered this for a moment before answering. He would've liked an Irish coffee right now, but decided against it. "Just a regular coffee. Dark, but not black."

Nathan nodded and glanced back to Katara with a warm smile that made Zuko's blood boil and his skin crawl. "There are these great maple-syrup pastries on special today, if you guys want to try some."

Katara shook her head, still smiling. "No thanks, I'm trying to slim down for the surfing competition this weekend," she drew her shoulders up, just a little uneasily.

Nathan rolled his eyes and tucked his pad away. "Yeah, like you need it," he flattered her sarcastically. "I'll get you your coffee." He turned back to the kitchen and left them.

Zuko pulled a face at the blush on Katara's cheeks and then leant forward in a mocking tone. _"Anything else, I can get you, hot stuff? An orgasm maybe?"_

Katara gasped and smacked him on the forearm across the table, before her blush died back and she looked out the window. "What are you, jealous?"

Zuko thought on this for a moment before answering honestly. "Yes."

The Marina girl opposite him frowned immediately and turned her eyes on his. She thought back to the kiss, at the Aristocrat, and realized he must've been confused, by how she had pushed it to the back of her mind in this fog of happenings throughout the last two weeks. Her frown softened and she lifted her hands, covering her face with them and sighing in thought. "Shit," she murmured, her thoughts swirling in a fugue of confusion.

Zuko shook his head and gave a grunt with his own thoughts. He realized she was having a spell of complications in her life right now, and the last thing he wanted to do was add to it, but to be fair, she could at least not flirt with that walking Ken-doll in front of him. "I'm jealous. It's not your problem, but don't … can you just _not _flirt with _Nathan _in front of me?" he sang out the waiters name mockingly with a rasp and a raise of the eyebrow.

Katara nodded, her face still in her hands. "It's not like I haven't thought about it, Zuko," she peeked at him through her fingers. "I'm just … I've got a lot going on right now."

"I know. I'm sorry about this morning. I didn't realize Azula got her … Azula-ness … from my mother," Zuko offered a nervous half-smile by tugging up a single corner of his mouth.

Katara laughed into her palm. "Well, we'll call it even after the mix up at my house with my dad."

Zuko laughed simply as the bell on the door of the coffee shop rang and two teenagers walked in cheerfully. Toph looked around and caught the two teens at the table, grabbed Aang's hand and tugged him toward them, grabbed the seat beside Katara and sank down in it.

"Show them to me, Katara. I've got to see 'em." Toph sat down next to Zuko and grinned at her friend, dropping the back of her hand to the table and motioning with pale, unsuspecting fingers for Katara to give her something. Nobody would ever suspect that those delicate-looking fingers could corrupt the Alcatraz of firewalls.

Katara smirked and drew the earpieces she'd made last night from her pocket, rolling them across the table to the colorblind girl. "Didn't get to use them, but they'll come in handy one day," she commented, speaking more to herself than anyone else. She eyed the com-links proudly and allowed her smirk to grow a little bit wider on her face.

Toph lifted one of them and turned it in her fingers, scrutinizing it. "And there I thought you hadn't been paying attention to me," she dropped the one in her fingers beside its twin.

Aang shrugged his jacket off as Katara smiled proudly, scooping up the com-links and tucking them back into the pocket of her borrowed jeans. He put down the newspaper he'd carried into the coffee shop, on the table, and draped his jacket over the back of his chair. "You should take a look at this, Katara," he told her, in a solemn tone that didn't inspire confidence.

Katara slid the paper in front of her and grimaced at the front-page picture of her and her father leaving the courthouse in their elegant suits yesterday. The headline above was in bold white capitols, outlined in thick black; _'KIDNAP VICTIM HELPS FBI JAIL RAPIST'. _Katara sighed and lifted a hand to her head, pressing two fingers against one temple. "Someone read the article for me," she slid the paper to the middle of the table.

Zuko gave a frown before opening the newspaper to the third page and cleared his throat, reciting the words from the page with disbelief and incredulity. _"Front page: Fifteen-year-old Katara Marina and her father Hakoda leaving the courthouse after the Jonathan Prescott III conviction. Brought to light at the criminal trial of Jonathan Evan Prescott III was the cooperation of Hakoda and Katara Marina with the FBI to capture the kidnapper-rapist who kidnapped nineteen teenaged girls over five years across five states. Marina's testimony under oath yesterday was that the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an ingestible GPS tracking device to her that was later used for her rescue and that of fifteen other girls Jonathan Prescott had abducted over the course of his criminal career._

"_While neither Miss Marina or her father released a statement to the press, Sokka Marina, the victim's brother-,"_

Zuko paused short and allowed his eyes to widen as he continued.

"… _Sokka Marina, the victim's brother spoke to the Dahlia Coast Times and made the following statement: 'I really didn't agree with the GPS-thingy, I found out afterwards, only a day or two before my sister was kidnapped. My father and I argued over it. I wish they'd just stuck Katara in protective custody; then she wouldn't have to live her life with this hanging over her head'."_

Zuko put the paper down and frowned at Katara. "I didn't know Sokka spoke to the press."

Katara grimaced. "Neither did I."

* * *

><p>Katara slammed the front door behind her, the clock on the wall reading something like quarter-past two in the afternoon - time was moving unnaturally slow today, - ready to grab Sokka by the throat and scream at him, only to hear pre-existing shouting already occurring in the house. Sokka and Hakoda were in the library, yelling their heads off. Katara stormed into the library and saw Hakoda standing by a glass-wood table with his hand on the front page of a newspaper, and Sokka was standing with his arms flailing a few feet from his father. She ducked behind the wall and listened in.<p>

"-_**What**_ were you _**thinking**_?"

"_**What?**_ I spoke my mind! I told them the _**truth**_; Katara should've been put in _protective custody_, and _**you **_let her make a decision she'll grow to **regret**!" Sokka yelled angrily.

"… _Don't_ turn this around, Sokka! You were _**way**_ out of line! _I told you_ **not** to speak to the press and you _**deliberately**_ went behind my back, _just_ to **spite** me!"

"-I didn't _do it_ to _**spite**_ you! Agreeing to that GPS _**bullshit**_ was pure **stupidity**! You made a _shit_ decision where you _**should've**_ known _**better**_ and people should _**know**_ about it! Your bad **decision** is going to cost _**Katara**_, and that's on _**you**_!" Sokka screamed viciously at his dad.

"Go on, Sokka! **Say** what you want to say! _**Go ahead **_and _blame_ me for what happened to your sister - I _**know**_ you're thinking it!" her father's voice was hoarse and grating in his throat.

"_**Fine**_! It's **your fault**! It's your fault that she was **kidnapped**! You could've _**prevented**_ it! You _could've_ told her it was _**too dangerous**_, but you _didn't_! _**It's … YOUR … FAULT!**_"

Katara grabbed the banister and ran around it, before making a fleeting escape to her room, as quiet as she could. She ran into her bedroom and closed the door behind her, pressing her back to it and grabbing her head in frustration. _'It's not dad's fault. It's not dad's fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault Sokka's on cactus juice. It's my fault. It's my fault…' _she bit back a silent sob and felt her face screw up in agony. She could still hear the screaming downstairs, echoing through the walls and floors and ceilings. She pressed her palms over her ears.

'_Stop shouting. Stop shouting. I'm sorry. Please stop shouting.' _She heard her head murmuring as she slid down the door and curled up at the foot of it, stifling silent sobs of self-hatred. _'It's my fault Sokka had the cactus juice. It's my fault he's blaming Dad. It's my fault Mom died. It's my fault. All of it … it's all my fault.' _She let go of one of her ears and buried her arm in the crook of her own elbow, waiting for the screaming to stop. She'd told her father she could handle it.

Her common sense yelled at her from the innermost crevice of her mind, but she couldn't hear it over the chanting of the terrified, tearful child begging her father and brother to stop. Katara questioned this many times over, how her mind was put together, but she never got any further than 'maybe I'm just a baby'. She couldn't help but feel like crap at the sound of the staggering shouts downstairs.

She wondered if this had ever been a feeling Zuko had had. His parents had once been together, in a relationship where they must've screamed a lot. She could imagine a tiny Zuko hiding in the cupboard under the stairs with his sister, both of them covering their ears and counting in their heads, desperately hoping for their parents to stop fighting.

"_Handle it? Well obviously she __couldn't __**handle **__it, Dad! Have you _seen_ that cut on her leg?"_

Katara buried her face in her hands and wished desperately for the shouting to stop, but it didn't. She had to get away from this before it drove her insane.

* * *

><p>Katara went to Suki's house, only to find her friend lounging in a four-hour old bubble bath with a near-empty bottle of red wine and the CD player singing out 'Love The Way You Lie'. Katara had asked what was wrong, but Suki had just murmured drunkenly about Sokka's cactus-juice addiction, and then broken into tears apologizing for keeping Sokka from being in the house the night she'd been kidnapped. Katara had forgiven her friend on the spot, but Suki had still been wailing in the tub when she left.<p>

After that, Katara had been very worried that things weren't going to ever go back to normal after this. She had gone to Suki for someone to lean on, but only ended up allowing Suki to lean on her. With a growing feeling of despair knotting in the pit of her stomach, Katara had gone to Aang's house. Aang's foster-parents were really nice, and understanding. They knew what to was like to be discriminated against, for being lesbians, and they also knew what it was like to blame themselves for problems in their family; Tricia's (overtly religious) family had divorced as a result of her coming out of the closet at nineteen.

When she arrived at Aang's house she knocked the door loudly, before tucking her hands into the pockets of Azula's jeans and waiting impatiently. As she lifted a hand to knock again, the door opened and a friendly face with gray eyes and a blue arrow smiled at her.

"Oh, hey Katara! I thought you went home to beat the shit out of Sokka," he lifted a hand and scratched his bald head.

Katara glanced sideways ruefully. "I did, but he and my dad are fighting, and I … they're shouting and stuff, so … I didn't really … want to …"

Aang nodded in understanding immediately and grabbed Katara by the hand, pulling her into the house and shutting the door behind her. He let go of her and ran up the stairs, inviting her to follow him. Katara trudged up the stairs after her friend, her head beginning to hurt with the events of the day, and the night, and realized she hadn't slept last night. Come to think of it, she hadn't been sleeping well lately.

"Katara's here." Aang told someone, walking into his bedroom, his voice surprisingly solemn.

Katara expected his words to be followed by 'Put your clothes on', because she expected it was Toph in his room, but instead she heard a bone-chilling rasp that she recognized at once, even before she stepped in and saw the scarred teen sprawled tiredly on the rug on the floor. Zuko immediately sat up and watched her with concerned eyes.

"Hey," he spoke softly, his right brow - and to a lesser degree his left - coming down hard. "Have you been crying?"

Katara shook her head and lifted a hand to her face, wiping at her eyes for any traces of the unforgotten tears. "No," she snapped, hating the lump in her throat for making her a liar.

Zuko sighed and looked to Aang, who was flopping down on the (epic) Star Wars bedspread on his bed. Aang shrugged to Zuko as best he could while lying on his side murmuring something along the lines of 'I don't know'. He lolled his head back to look out his window to the blazing afternoon sun overhead, before looking back to the other two.

"Where's Toph?" Katara wondered aloud, her voice a simple murmur, her mind clouded and fogged. She remembered feeling like this before fainting in the middle of town; lightheaded, dizzy, sick in the stomach, and confused. She glanced around and wondered why the room was so blurry.

Zuko crossed his legs under him, his eyes narrowing. "You don't look so good," he noted bluntly. Obviously, she looked good all the time, like, amazing. She looked gorgeous, physically, but she didn't look in too good of shape. She seemed to have gotten pale in the few seconds she'd been standing there before them, and if he squinted hard enough, he might have wondered if she were swaying on her feet.

Katara took a seat on the bed beside Aang and shook her head. "Sokka and my Dad are really … _really _fighting. They were shouting." She gave a breath of exhaustion. "And Suki … Suki's drunk. She's not holding up like she usually does … I thought things were getting better."

Zuko bit his lip. _'What would Uncle say?' _He cleared his throat and offered what he could. "Well ... sometimes, life is like a cloud. There's a light side, and a dark side, and in between there's a silver lining. It's like a silver sandwich. When ... life gets you down, you just ... take a bite of the silver sandwich...?"

Katara raised an eyebrow at Zuko.

Aang grinned suddenly and sat up. "I know how we can cheer you up, Katara."

Both Katara and Zuko looked to the bald kid on the bed with confusion on their faces.

"We can give Zuko a make-over," he grinned immaturely.

Katara stared at Aang for a moment in disbelief, before a snigger escaped her, her mind moving from images of Sokka drinking cactus juice to images of Zuko wearing lipstick and green eye-shadow. The snigger became a giggle, and the giggle became a chuckle, and the chuckle became a laugh that had her hunched over and pinching the bridge of her nose and howling, her back jumping with each laugh she gave. Aang was laughing too, just the same. The image in Katara's head of Zuko in the lipstick and eye-shadow had now become that of Zuko all decked out like a transvestite, in a huge, thigh-high, hot pink platform boots and a micro-skirt, and fishnets, and a tube-top made out of masking tape.

Zuko crossed his arms and scowled. "You guys are a couple of four-year olds." He grumbled in annoyance.

This only made Katara laugh harder, so hard that she fell on the floor and rolled onto her back, clutching her stomach.

The amazing bit, a few minutes later, was that to see her smile, Zuko allowed Katara to put lipstick, and blusher and all that other girly shit on his face and tie his hair up into a ridiculous ponytail at the top of his head, until he was glaring in horror at the image of himself in the mirror. He remembered Katara and Aang conspiring to take a picture of Azula and Suki making out and networking it to the other members of the troupe.

As Katara grabbed one of Toph's (rarely worn) miniskirts from the space under Aang's bed, he really fucking hoped neither had their cell-phones on them.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: LAWL! Zuko's such a sweetie pie - that how you can tell he loves Katara. LOL I can just imagine that^ being put into fan-art! ^_^ ZOMG like, Zuko in a miniskirt! This is a happy-chappy! The next chapter is where I'm going to take advantage of the whole 'spring-break' theme before sending them back to school. I miss Donovan for being an opportunity for Katara to be bad-ass :3 ZOMG the Blue Spirit and the Painted Lady! I loved that; I'm not even sure if it's from a movie or not, but it was so right for the moment. "Don't let me go!" "Never." I had myself getting all fangirly on my own writing! Half this chapter is just the raid at the mall, but I have missed the Blutara, Painted-Blue stuff, or whatever you wanna call it.**

**What's THIS? A re-view of one of my favorite moments? -le gasp!-**

* * *

><p>"Probably." Zuko answered. "Hang on." he paused, his mind knotted. "Wait, are you fantasizing about the Blue Spirit?"<p>

Katara sat up straight, now defensive. "I can fantasize about superheroes. Sokka went a whole summer obsessed with Wonderwoman." She glared at Zuko. "And _you_ liked Jean Grey from X-Men."

"Hey! Katara!" Sokka snapped at Katara.

Zuko laughed again, but this time a little nervously. "I'm just saying, it's a little bit like those Justin Bieber fans." He tried; he couldn't have his best friend having a crush on his alter ego.

"No it's not!" Katara yelped over-sensitively. After a while, she added. "I- is it?"

Toph laughed out loud. "Oh, this is too good." She snorted. "Katara wants a man in tights. So much for your bad-boy theory, Sparky."

* * *

><p><strong>You gotta love Toph. I gotta love Toph. Where was the love for Toph this chapter? Ohmyfuck I'm a terrible, terrible person. Lots of love for Toph next chapter! And Sokka! And … and … and Ozai. :) Come OOOOn, he's a sexy beast and you know it. Oh, shit, it's four AM. I gots to go to sleep! Reviews are like ice-cream. You know, the softie ones get at McDonalds, with strawberry sauce ... Mmm ... if only you just stopped at a window to get reviews *le sigh* ^_^<strong>


	7. Love Is In The Air

A few days, on a Saturday, after the big fight between Sokka and Hakoda, Katara had made plans to meet with Aang, Toph, Suki, Zuko, Ty Lee, Mai and Azula at the beach, for the surfing competition. She hadn't told her father, or her brother, that she planned to compete, mainly because she knew they'd freak out and tell her she wasn't allowed to leave the house until the competition was over, but also because she had invited Zuko, and Sokka wasn't on good terms with the Scorsese boy.

She'd been all ready to go, with her swimsuit on under her clothes and a rucksack on her back containing sun-cream, two energy drinks, two towels, lunch and some other knickknacks, when she'd gone to get her surfboard from the basement, only to discover that the door down into the aforementioned basement was locked. She didn't want to ask her father to unlock it for her, because then he'd catch on and ground her, and her guns were hidden at Zuko's house, so she couldn't shoot it open.

"Fuck!" she whispered to herself, angry with both her father and brother for a brief moment.

Upstairs she heard her brother whining. _"Katara, Foo-Foo-Cuddly-Poops pissed up my bed!"_

Katara shook her head and laughed, before turning and waltzing out of the utility room for the front door. Later in her walk she realized Sokka had expected her to come along and fix whatever mess his retarded-ass cat had made, and this caused her to begin thinking of hiding Sokka's car keys somewhere he'd never find them, like in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. By the time she got to the beach - without her surfboard - her rucksack was only on one shoulder and her feet were beginning to hurt.

In the crowd that had drawn to the competition, it took the Marina girl a moment to find her friends at an ice-cream truck. Toph of course, the girl who went to McDonalds and ordered a happy meal, was continually telling the vendor 'more sprinkles!' each time he sprinkled a few more on, and Aang, Ty Lee, Azula and Zuko were struggling not to break out in laughter. Even Mai wore a smirk on her face. Suki seemed to feel guilty just for standing near them.

"Hey, guys." Katara walked up to them, adjusting the way the bag hung on her shoulder in the hot sun overhead, tossing her loose braid with her free hand, as her neck was heating under it.

Aang turned to smile at her, but then his face was overcome by surprise. "Hey, where's your surfboard?"

Katara shook her head. "My dad locked it up." She admitted in annoyance, before perking up and smiling. "But at least I can enjoy the competition. People wiping out, tactless tourists, you know, the usual." She pushed past Aang and stood beside Toph to order her own ice cream, reaching into her pocket and drew out a few dollar bills.

Toph pouted childishly at the ice-cream vendor. "What the fuck is that supposed to be? You're putting sprinkles on ice-cream, not dog-shit on a field!" she threw her hands up in exasperation.

The vendor gave a groan of exhaustion and just handed her the ice cream in one hand and the little sprinkle-pot in the other. "Here, then. _You _do it." He put his hands on his hips inside the ice cream truck and glared at her with a face only a mother could love.

Toph, ever the genius, poured a gratuitous amount of sprinkles into her palm and used her palm to expertly pour the sprinkles onto her softie ice cream, before handing the vendor back the pot of sprinkles. "_That's _how you put sprinkles on ice cream." She noted snidely, with a sassy tilt of the head and a sickly-sweet smirk, before turning her back to the vendor and walking off, licking the ice cream blissfully.

Katara approached and slapped down two dollar-notes with an amicable smile at the ice cream salesman, who seemed to be having a rough day. "Hey, can I get a lemonade Popsicle?" she asked politely, eyes bright and friendly, and the corners of her mouth tugged up.

The man smiled at this; someone who _wasn't _ordering a complicated softie ice cream, and then asking for sauce, and sprinkles, and a piece of chocolate, and then trying to haggle down the price, and so on, was before him. He lifted the top of a freezer and brought out a wrapped Popsicle. He slid it over a little metal table between them and took one dollar from the two she'd put down, sliding back the second and making a motion with his hand that said 'don't sweat it'.

Katara smiled even wider and nodded her thanks to the man, taking her Popsicle and her dollar and tucking the latter into the pocket of her blue, tropical-designed, knee-length beach shorts. She turned and followed the others to an empty patch of beach, where Ty Lee, Toph and Azula set out three beach towels side-by-side, forming a large, square-like space for all of them to loiter on. Ty Lee pushed open the two beach parasols she and Azula had brought along and stabbed them into the sand, so their shadows loomed over the towels.

Toph and Aang sat down beside one another, their eyes turned to the water out ahead of them, where surfers were practicing in the great swelling waves before the competition began. As the others sat down, Katara shrugged her rucksack to the floor and grabbed the bottom of her tee shirt, pulling it over her head to reveal a stunning white swimsuit that emphasized every curve of her torso.

"Anyone else coming swimming?" she asked, glancing past Toph and Aang to Zuko and Suki, taking the wrapper off of her Popsicle.

Zuko considered this; his beach shorts could pass as swimming attire, he supposed. He licked at his ice cream and waved a hand at his friend. "I'll come. Just let me finish this."

Suki tossed her Popsicle stick to the sand and stood up. "I'll come too," she stated blankly, that strange, indescribable guilt still overtly present in her voice. It made Katara feel a little bit sick; it reminded her of those girls Jonathan Prescott had kidnapped.

"Hey!" two voices yelled at once from afar.

The gang turned their heads to the sound of the voices, to see Yue Chander and Song MacFarlane approaching at a slow run on the sand. The two of them spent a lot of time together, both being enthusiastic equestrians that spent most of their time on this very beach on their horses, usually not having bothered to saddle up. Song herself was able to ride a horse without even a bit, with a simple head-collar and leadline, but that was another story.

The two girls walked across the dry, deep sand toward them, both in dry swimsuits, ready to go swimming.

"Katara, I thought you competed every year!" Yue smiled cheerfully at the Marina girl.

The girl with the blue eyes, who was already on her feet, grabbed Yue around the shoulders and grinned, "Yeah, well, not this year. I haven't talked to you in ages." She commented, hugging her friend. "What have you two been up to?" she asked, pulling away from the girl with the long silver hair.

Yue smiled at Song, who answered. "We went up to Oregon for a show-jumping competition last week, we took Apache and Sioux with us. Apache jumped three-foot-six." She grinned happily; Katara remembered Apache, a young bay stallion that had been born on Song's farm with badly conformed feet that a vet had dubbed reason to euthanise him. As it was, the stallion was actually completely sound to be ridden and jumped.

"Wow, that's great!" Katara exclaimed happily.

"Do you still ride?" Yue asked curiously.

Katara pulled her mouth to one side. "I guess I still can, but I don't have a horse. We had to get rid of the old pony; I outgrew him." She shrugged thoughtfully. "Dad never went about getting me something else to ride."

Song clapped her hands together and clutched them to her chest enthusiastically. "Really? My dad's got this gorgeous paint stallion for sale that would be brilliant for you! Katara, he's stunning, you have to come and see him sometime soon." She made a motion with her hands that made Katara laugh out loud.

With a shake of the head, Katara just smiled. "I'm not really on speaking terms with my dad right now, I doubt he'd buy me a horse just yet. Plus he's got enough problems with Sokka …" she trailed off pensively.

Yue frowned. "Why, what's going on with Sokka?"

"He's … you heard about the … abduction, right?" Katara drew her shoulders up awkwardly.

Song nodded and gave Katara a sympathetic expression. She had heard on the news the morning Katara had been abducted, and also just a few days ago of how Jonathan Prescott had been convicted of her abduction and those of eighteen other girls. "Yeah, we did. Is it to do with that?"

"Sokka's not coping well, he's … he's gotten some stuff from Jet." She lowered her voice to keep anyone else from hearing; she hadn't told Suki about it because she was having her own 'problem', except with red wine instead of peyote. Come to think of it, the only people she'd told were Zuko, Toph and Aang. She wondered if it was best to keep it that way. The two girls she was talking to understood that Jet was heavy into drugs, what with all the shit his junkie parents brought into the house, and most of Jet's friends were junkies just the same. Jet himself had some control of his abusing, but that was like saying one had control of how much they bled.

Yue and Song both gasped, but then regained their composure to simply shake their heads. "That's terrible." Yue glanced sideways ruefully. She couldn't imagine Sokka as any kind of drug abuser; after all, he was smart, and funny, and charming, and everything a drug addict wasn't. She glanced past Katara to Suki and wondered why his girlfriend wasn't with him now, helping him to cope with things; why she wasn't being for him what he was substituting with drugs.

Crossing her arms over her chest and smiling weakly, Katara gave them a look that thanked them for their concern. "I know. I don't know what to do with him … the house is just so alien lately. It's like we're all talking in different languages. We can't get through to one another. Sokka and Dad are the worst." She shook her head and renewed her smile; she didn't want to be miserable today. "Anyway, I'm not here to mope. I'm here to enjoy the wipe-outs." She stated zestfully.

Song nodded. "That makes three of us." She noted, obviously referring to Yue, herself and Katara, before glancing up the beach to where their beach towels were, with her boyfriend. "We're going to hit the water. How about you?"

Katara grabbed the waistline of her beach shorts and tugged them halfway down her thighs, before drawing her legs out and dropping them to the floor, soaking in the sunlight and breathing in the salty ocean air. "Took the words right out of my mouth." She turned to address the others to see who else was coming.

Zuko was getting up and pulling off his shirt, Suki was stepping out of her jeans, Aang was up and tearing off his sweatshirt - Katara had no idea why Aang was wearing a sweatshirt on a day like this - and encouraging Toph to come too. Ty Lee and Azula were up and already in their swimsuits, trying to get Mai to join them, and Mai was insisting she'd be happier to just sit here and hang out on the beach in the shade.

"Zuzu, you'd better put on sun cream," Azula glanced sideways to her brother, reaching into the bag on her shoulder and producing some sun-protection. "Remember how you burnt last summer?" she bit back the grin growing on her face. Zuko had turned into that big red teletubby last year in the sun. He'd been so red his scar hadn't contrasted with his unmarred skin.

Zuko rolled his eyes and motioned to his sister to toss the bottle his way. Azula, Ty Lee and Mai had already rubbed sun cream into their skins long before leaving the house, partially because of their fair skin and partially because it was an excuse to pamper themselves. He flicked open the top and turned the bottle upside down, squeezing the coconut-scented cream into his palm. He then dropped the bottle to the towel under his feet and rubbed his hands together, and proceeding to cover his face, shoulders, neck, chest and arms in it.

This reminded Aang and Toph that they also burnt horribly in the sun, so they got out their sun-cream and continued to rub it into one another's skin.

Katara glanced to Yue and Song amicably. "You guys go ahead, we'll catch up."

They agreed silently and turned toward the water at a run. Katara stepped into the shade of the parasols and leant down to her rucksack, unzipping it and drawing out a bottle she'd picked up at a corner store on the walk to the beach; it was some suntanning lotion with a 'Pina Colada' scent, or at least that's what it said on the bottle. When she unscrewed the cap and sniffed it, it did - in fact - smell like a Pina Colada.

Azula, Ty Lee and Toph were suddenly laughing, and Katara could hear Zuko making a grunt of annoyance. She lifted her head from the rucksack to see Zuko reaching over his own shoulder to put sun cream on his back. She allowed herself a laugh at this.

"Sparky, you look like a crab trying to break-dance," Toph cackled wickedly, shaking her head and sobbing with laughter.

Aang bit back a laugh at the scowl Zuko gave, before resuming his duty of applying sun-cream to Toph's back, occasionally working his thumbs into a muscle knot in her back. Katara rolled her eyes and dropped the bottle of Pina Colada lotion to the beach towel under her bare feet and approached Zuko. She leant down and picked up the sunblock he'd dropped to the ground.

"Stay still Zuko, before you fall over." She gave a laugh at him.

Zuko stopped and wiped the rest of the sun lotion from his hands off on his beach shorts. He wore a scowl that could make Queen Victoria look like a vaudeville performer, and this only intensified the humor Katara found in his little dance. "Must be nice not to burn in the sun," he commented darkly, clearly talking to her.

Katara smirked at this. "You're right, it is." She squeezed the lotion into her palm, and then smacked her hand - cold lotion and all - onto his back, before discarding the bottle to the ground. He jumped at the cold and glanced over his shoulder at her, watching her expression as she ran her hands over his back.

"Uh … cold?" he pushed his brows up at her as if she were retarded.

Katara rolled her eyes at this. "You'll think back to the cold when you're under the hot sun, and you'll start drooling." She felt a little lump under her fingers and pressed on it curiously. The lump turned out to be a muscle knot, from carrying that big heavy school bag around school all the time. His back straightened as she pressed on it, and she decided to see if she could do anything about it for him.

Zuko tilted his head back and drew in a breath as her fingers pulled apart the knot in his back. "Fuck … where'd you learn to do that?" he wondered aloud.

Katara frowned thoughtfully. "After the suicide attempt they sent me to a mental facility. They had all kinds of stress-reducers there, and one of them was massage and massage lessons," she explained reluctantly, releasing the knot and running her finger over where it had once been. She continued to smooth out sun lotion on his back.

Realizing he'd made her uncomfortable, Zuko didn't further push the subject. She gave the back of his shoulder a smack when she was done covering his back in sunblock, which caused him to wince, but he didn't snap at her, despite wanting to. He turned and glared, but he didn't snap at her. "You're a _saint_, you know that?" he told her, half sarcastically. He meant it, after all, his back felt better for want of a muscle knot, though she had hurt him with that smack.

Katara grinned at his expression, dropping the thought of the mental facility. "Come on, let's hit the water." She grinned past him to the others, forgetting the 'Pina Colada' tanning lotion.

* * *

><p>The gang waded into the water, their cares floating away on the cool water. Toph, unlike the others, was not relaxing to the waves, and was instead clutching Aang around the shoulders while he gave her a piggy-back into the saltwater, having promised not to make her swim on her own. Toph trusted him to hold to that promise, and so she was calmer than she could've been, but it wasn't the same as being relaxed.<p>

The further out into the water Katara got, the more she wished she had her surfboard with her, as she watched the large waves beginning to come in, further out to sea. They stayed relatively close to the shore, because the tide was in and they didn't have to go too far to be hip-deep in water, though Katara and Yue were continuing to move further out into the water, much to the annoyance of the others, especially Toph, as she feared this would make the others follow them, out into deeper waters.

Song called out to Yue to come back, and she eventually did, Katara not far behind her.

"Tell me you're not enjoying this," Toph murmured, clutching Aang tightly, her head over his shoulder.

Aang turned his head and put a kiss to her cheek. "Don't worry, Toph; we're not going any deeper."

Toph managed a smirk, the ends of her waist-length hair wet against the small of her back, her bangs still dry and framing her face. "That's what you said-,"

Aang groaned in annoyance at her getting him back for last time. "That's gross." He grimaced, giving a reluctant laugh.

Toph grinned and squeezed her legs around his waist, clutching a little tighter in the hot sun and cool waters. Suki, not far away from them, sank down until her lower lip was below the water and her upper lip was above it, her eyes watching the water below disinterestedly and apathetically. Mai, Ty Lee and Azula were throwing a blown-up beach ball in a triangle, and Zuko was waiting for Katara to get back, since it was kind of awkward between him and Song.

Katara swam hard and fast after Yue, so she was breathing the same when she stopped and got her feet under her, sinking her toes into the sand beneath her. She grinned at Zuko through a veil of wet hair, before tossing her hair back so fast it whipped against the skin, through her swimsuit, of the small of her back. "The sand is all sludgy between my toes." She commented obviously, lifting a hand and pushing her wet hair back from her face.

Zuko smirked at her and kicked out under her feet so she fell back with a shout. "Not anymore." He watched as she sank below the water. He blinked for a moment, wondering why she hadn't come back up. As it turned out, Katara had swum under the water right past Zuko and was crouched in the murky waters behind him. "Katara?" he asked, wading toward where she'd just been. Something pinched at the back of his knee and he freaked out, dancing as if there were a crab climbing his leg. He turned and jumped away, watching as Katara came up from the water, laughing.

Aang sank down a little in the water, until his knees were in the sand, and the water was just under his chin. Toph yelped as the water came sloshing up her back, settling just below her shoulders. She clutched Aang so hard her fingernails would leave little crescent shapes in his skin. "What … the _fuck_ are you doing, Twinkletoes?" she seethed at him, her voice echoing in his ear, her back stiffening as the water hit her.

"Put your feet down." Aang instructed her calmly, a meditative glint in his eye.

She frowned, but reluctantly and slowly uncoiled her legs from around his waist, until she felt the sludgy wet sand under them. She blinked in surprise, finding the water less daunting when she could feel the earth beneath her. "… Oh."

Aang smiled and let go of her completely, to turn around and give a big goofy grin at her. "That wasn't so bad, now was it?"

Toph raised an eyebrow and pulled her arm back, flexing the muscles in her arm, before extending her fist right into Aang's upper arm. "Don't push it," she crossed her arms over her chest and focused her concentration on the feeling of the sand under her feet. "You push it, and I'll push _you_."

"You push me and I'll bring you down with me."

Toph's mouth did what the mouth of a pouch does when you pull the drawstrings of it, and she glanced back to Aang. "… Touché," she ceded darkly. "But remember that one day you'll be old, and asleep, in a wheelchair. And I'll be pushing it. So you wanna think, okay, twinkletoes?"

Aang didn't make the mistake of mentioning that she'd just implied that they were going to be together until he was old and asleep in a wheelchair. He just enjoyed his silent victory. Then all of a sudden, Katara and Zuko were splashing one another, catching them between their splashes and laughs. The water hit them like rain, and Toph and Aang gave tiny smiles as she pressed her hands to his chest and gave him a chaste kiss on the lips that he captured with a more passionate one of his own. Her smile told him she was glad she had come into the water.

* * *

><p>They stalked back, dripping wet from head to toe, to their square of beach towels about a half-hour after delving into the water, and Yue and Song took off not long before that; Song had had a horse that needed medicine every twelve hours, and Yue … well, Yue hadn't quite said what she needed to do, but they didn't ask. They got to the towels and opened their bags, drawing out more towels and wrapping themselves in them. The surfing competition seemed to be coming to an end, as the surfers were now stepping onto the beach, and the hot girls in bikinis were running toward them like screaming fan-girls.<p>

Then, when they were dry enough that their hair wasn't falling in strings, there was a little tambourine beat. Suki snapped her head up, knowing the song as Sokka's favorite. A smile overtook her face, despite her struggles to remain solemn that day. Katara caught the smile and it brought one to her own face, her head beginning to nod to the music.

'_Love is in the air; everywhere I look around. Love is everywhere, every sight and every sound.'_

"I love this song." Suki tilted her head up to the sun and soaked it in, as if she had just woken up from a bad dream. Suddenly it seemed like the world was still spinning, and the sky was the deepest blue she'd ever seen, and the air was so light you could get high from it. Things weren't the way she had seen them for the past two weeks; things were light and fluffy, like the froth on a cold Budweiser.

'_And I don't know if I'm being foolish; don't know if I'm being wise. But it's something that I must believe in, and it's here when I look in your eyes …'_

Katara felt excitement in her stomach, like the kind in her stomach she'd felt during the kiss with Zuko. She didn't yet know where she'd heard the song, but she knew she'd heard it somewhere before, somewhere happy and cheerful. She couldn't even fathom any ideas of the mental facility right now, or the abduction; she felt like she was on gas and air. Everything seemed hilarious and cheerful.

'_Love is in the air, in the whisper of the trees. Love is in the air, in the thunder of the sea,'_

"Come on!" Aang grabbed Toph's hand and began running toward the large bamboo platform further up the beach, where the music was coming from, where there was an ice-cream stand, and a huge bamboo tent over the bamboo floor, and people were beginning to dance to the music. Toph yelped in surprise and laughed, running off with Aang.

'_And I don't know if I'm just dreaming, don't know if I feel sane, but it's something that I must believe in, and it's there when you call out my name …'_

Katara ran after them, and Suki took off after her, and Ty Lee followed, and Mai, Azula and Zuko had to run to catch up with them, until they were standing on this festive little platform with a bamboo roof over them, and music was singing happily, rather than pulsing like a nightclub, and everything was just _right. _Zuko moved to ask Katara to dance with him - Toph and Aang were already dancing happily - but the Marina girl grabbed Suki and the two began to dance happily.

'_Love Is In The Air! Love Is In The Air! Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh …'_

The smile on both girls' faces made him happy; everything was just _right. _He guessed love really was in the air. The two were dancing like sisters would, though he knew no girl with a sister other than Ty Lee, and Ty Lee hated all her sisters, but he knew this was what sisters dancing looked like, for some reason. He turned to Azula, who was wearing a smile she was obviously trying to force down, and he offered his hand to her.

'_Love is in the air, in the rising of the sun. Love is in the air, when the day is nearly done.'_

Azula raised her eyebrow. "Have you lost your mind, Zuzu?"

'_And I don't know you're an illusion, don't know if I see it true, but you're something that I must believe in, and you're there when I reach out for you …'_

Zuko smiled warmly. "Come on. Dance with your big brother."

'_Love is in the air, every sight and every sound. Love is in the air; everywhere I look around. And I don't know if I'm being foolish, don't know if I'm being wise, but it's something that I must believe in, and it's there when I look in your eyes …'_

Azula shook her head and grabbed his hand, allowing him the pleasure of dancing with her, both smiling in the feel-good music and soaking in what little sun could get at them through the bamboo roof. Ty Lee grabbed Mai's arm, much to the Goth girl's horror, and forced her to dance, but in the end, even Mai couldn't deny that there was something euphoric about the song, and eventually she gave in to dancing with Ty Lee, a reluctant smile on her face. The music welled up in their stomachs and they couldn't help but feel like they were going to burst with excitement like children on Christmas Day.

'_Love Is In The Air! Love Is In The Air! Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh … Love Is In The Air! Love Is In The Air! Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh … Love Is In The Air! Oh, Love Is In The Air! …'_

* * *

><p>"Get up, Sokka." Yue's voice came to him like a bolt from the blue, and he leapt up from his position sprawled in his underwear on his large double bed, with a 'Fall Out Boy' bed spread under him. His eyes focused on her, seeing her standing at the end of the room, holding the coke bottle of peyote. His eyes widened as she stalked into his en-suite toilet.<p>

"Agh!" he screamed, jumping off the bed and running after her, in just his sky-blue underpants. "What are you doing?" he cawed at her in horror, stood in the doorway of the bathroom.

She unscrewed the cap of the coke bottle and turned it on its end, over the sink. The green liquid flowed out in an irregular stream, and she looked him in the eyes the entire time she did it. He crossed his arms and his expression was one that said 'Psshh, I've got plenty more', until she gestured with her free hand to the pile on the floor of empty soda bottles, and his eyes widened and he grabbed his hair, staring at her.

"NO!" he screeched, mortified, grabbing for the bottle in her hand, but the juice was all gone. He dropped it to the floor and cupped his face in his hands, eyes wide and his teeth abred between his fingers. "Oh no! Oh fuck! NO!" He cried, as he stalked back into his room and began pacing hyperactively, freaking out.

Yue followed him out into his bedroom and crossed her arms, her brows down and her frown unforgiving. "I take it Jet didn't mention I'm the one he comes to every time he wants to get clean." She raised a single eyebrow. She looked fierce, and beautiful; most of her hair was tied back at the back of her neck, her hair falling down to her ass, and two braids came from beneath that, sitting over her shoulders and stopping at the low neckline of her blouse. "How long?" she demanded adamantly.

"What?" Sokka murmured, as he paced.

"How long have you been on the stuff?"

Sokka shook his head. "A-a week, a week …"

Yue nodded and approached him. "No more." She grabbed his arm and stopped him pacing. "Okay, Sokka? No more."

Sokka stopped and looked her in the eye, swallowing the daunting, dry feeling in his throat. Was he able to promise that? No more cactus juice? No more tripping to escape this place, this horrid world that had threatened to rape his sister, this world that had killed his mother, this world that had created a disgusting human being like Zuko Scorsese? No more escape?

"No. More." Yue's grip on his arm tightened. "No more, Sokka!" she snapped at him.

Sokka gave a defeated breath and he turned to fully face her. He hung his head and nodded slightly. "Okay. O-okay … no more. No … no more." He licked his lips, his head down, somewhat comforted by her vice-grip on his upper arm, and somewhat strengthened by it.

Yue nodded and pulled him to her, his face finding itself in the crook of her neck. "Okay, Sokka." She told him adamantly, as he hugged her thankfully; he needed to get off the juice. He needed support to do that, and she was going to be his support. That she promised. "We're going to get you off that stuff. We're going to clean you up."

Then Sokka broke down in her arms, and she was his pillar of strength, holding him up the way Suki should've. But Yue couldn't hold that against the other girl; she imagined Suki had been broken too about what had happened, and both Sokka and Suki had broken, because neither of them could hold each other up. So she stayed with him, and sat him down, and made him drink lots of water to flush it all out of his system, and then she made him eat. He was going to be clean by the end of the weekend.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Short chapter, but I think it's a good chapter. This chapter is dedicated to my baby sister, Rosie, who lives with my dad, and didn't come to visit this weekend. I miss her. I sent her a message on Facebook, but she's not allowed on Facebook over there every day, she gets on like, every three days. Which sucks. Oh, anyway, back to the story.**

**Yukka or Sukka? I can't decide; I kind of liked Yukka a little more than Sukka in the early days, but this chapter made me love Suki that extra bit. Anyway, there's going to be some fun now; I'm going to fuck around with Sokka. Muahahahaaa! I need help though, deciding between Yue and Suki, on who gets Sokka! Gragh! God help me!**

**I love that song too, Suki. ^_^ I needed to make Suki happy this chapter; after all, the image of her in the bathtub last chapter kept me up. Then when I finally fell asleep last night, I dreamt I was having sex with this really hot guy, and then I was gardening, and then some assholes tore up this garden I made all pretty and stuff, and then I stole their bike and hid it in some basement. Then, to get out of this basement, I had to belly-crawl through a thirty-foot long tunnel about a foot and a half wide. I came out in some kind of football and chicken and prawn museum. I have freaky dreams. Afterward I thought, if I had to climb through there to get out, how the fuck did I get the bike in?**

**Back to school next chapter! And how fast was this update? I'm getting my groove back! Weehee! Ya know why? Because LOVE IS IN THE AIR! -well no not really, im actually really happy being single, but that's not the point- REVIEWS for the RE-VIEWS!**

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><p>Katara groaned in frustration. "It's a bunch of things; my dad's seeing someone, that stupid English substitute is staying, and Zuko …" Katara bit her lip and shut her eyes. "I think I like Zuko."<p>

Suki's hard expression softened. "Oh." She managed in surprise. _"Oh." _She repeated, this time more thoughtful.

"And he's running up that stupid blonde girl's ass now anyway. I mean, how could … I've known him for _years, _it took me this long to- I mean what kind of idiot ..." Katara trailed off and took a hand from the rail behind her to rub a temple with her fingertips. "Fuck." She whispered; it really was stupid. Everything.

Suki was frowning hard now. "Oh, Katara." He approached the younger girl and put a hand on her shoulder. Before she could say anything else, Katara had grasped onto her and pulled her into a hug, tight as a vice-grip. Suki could only hug the confused girl back, hoping she was helping in some way.

* * *

><p><strong>Yeah, I put that down to influence your decision of who should get Sokka. ^_^ But I'm still undecided. Totally unbiased. Ya know me, I'm Switzerland. REEEE-VIOOOOOZ MAKE MY WORLD GO ROUND. (Cuz Right Now It's Not Round, It's like ... rectangular. Like a Banana. NO! Like A Box Of Chocolates! ^_^)<strong>


	8. Back To School

Katara couldn't count how many funny looks she got upon stepping onto the grounds of Dahlia Coast High School. She kept her eyes down and returned none of the looks, trying to survive until she got to homeroom. As it happened, her homeroom was on the upper floor, and one of the furthest points from the main gate, and each step she took was more awkward than the last. She stopped at her locker and opened it, drawing out her history book; she had history first, and then English. She grimaced at the thought.

All that being said, today was Jin Territa's first day back at school too, after her ordeal. So it wasn't like she was alone. But she still felt isolated; with the sympathetic glances people gave her. It reminded her of the way people had looked at her after her suicide attempt. She felt sick to her stomach. The sun was shining outside, but Katara felt cold as she walked into her homeroom and looked around.

There was a long silence, all the students watching her, and the homeroom teacher doing the same. "Katara. W-welcome back." The woman tried her best attempt at sympathy, with a forced smile.

Katara rolled her eyes and walked in, slamming the door behind her. She grabbed her seat at the front of the classroom and flopped down in it. The class seemed to relax at the sight of her acting the way she usually did. "Get on with it, Mrs. Gerber," she leant back in her chair and eyed the teacher detachedly.

This day had hardly begun and she already felt like it would never end.

* * *

><p>"Toph Bei Fong, don't you dare sleep in my classroom!" Toph's homeroom teacher snapped sharply, smacking her hand down on the desk at the front of the room.<p>

The Bei Fong girl blinked tiredly; she'd been awake late into the night with Aang, setting up for the sleepover she was throwing for her birthday, with snacks, and the cake, and calling Pizza Hut for the reservations, and the like. Her chin rested on the top of her hands, and her palms lay flat on the desk. She continued to blink slowly, half-asleep.

"Toph-Bei-Fong!" Mrs. Donovan yelled angrily across the class to where Toph sat, near the back window of the classroom.

Toph grunted and lifted her head from the desk. "Jesus fucking Christ!" she snapped back at the woman, her brows coming down and her teeth clenching. "Can you not, _for once, _cut someone some fucking slack, you ridiculously oversized lard-puff?" she leapt to her feet, smacking her own palms down on her desk. She grabbed her bag from her seat and flung it over her shoulder. She snarled, stalking down toward the woman, for the door.

"Sit." Mrs. Donovan hissed in annoyance.

Toph crossed her arms, stopping a few feet from Donovan. "And then what? Roll over? Play dead? Go fuck yourself."

Donovan stared blankly at her.

Toph shook her head, rolled her eyes and continued walking. _'Yeah, that's what I thought,' _she grumbled inside her own head.

* * *

><p>"Hey, wait up!" Suki called, running after Katara and Toph, who were headed to their history lesson; that which they shared with Suki herself. She caught up with them, panting, and grabbed Katara's shoulder to steady herself. She gave a breathless laugh as she caught her oxygen. "Those … stairs … treacherous …"<p>

Katara laughed at this, but Toph didn't, far too tired and annoyed to do so. "You need to get in shape, Suki," Katara teased affectionately, lifting her hand and glancing at her watch. It was an old, ugly digital watch she'd gotten from Sokka, and it was eighteen minutes fast, but she'd been unable to fix that. All she could do was remember to subtract eighteen from the minutes' block on the watch's screen.

Suki nodded thoughtfully, still smiling. "Yeah, no shit."

The three of them stalked into the classroom about three minutes late, but the teacher was also late and nobody was there to reprimand them in the chatter of talking students in their first lesson on the first Monday back from spring break. When the history teacher finally joined them, she delved right into a long and boring lecture on the whole makeup-skimpy-outifts-low-baggy-pants-jewelry-foul-language-rules-breach of the students, which took up a whole ten-minute session of the lesson.

By the end of this lecture, the girls had begun to bore, and the following lecture of the Roman era did nothing to bring them back to earth. Eventually, Katara tore out a page from her notebook and flattened it on the desk, pulling a pen from her pencil case and clicking it for the ballpoint to appear. She pressed the end of her pen to the paper and began to write out a note to Suki. _'Did U talk 2 Sokka?'_

She slid the note sideways, keeping her eyes trained on the teacher, and Suki took the note, only carefully glancing down at it before plucking up her own pen, which wrote in pink ink. _'Tried on FB. He went offline.' _She slid the note back to Katara, who took a glance at it and frowned.

She brought her pen to the paper but no words came to her mind, and none from her pen just the same. She simply frowned and slid the paper from the table into her lap, slipping it into her pocket and allowing herself a sad breath. Sokka and Suki had always been the relationship she'd aspired to mimic with someone she loved the way Suki loved Sokka.

Eventually, the teacher wrote down a whole bunch of shit that they cared little for on the whiteboard, and instructed them to copy the aforementioned shit into their history books. Quickly jotting down, Toph found herself overly tired; more so than she should've been. She'd pulled various all-nighters before, and she _had_ slept - albeit for four hours only - last night. Maybe this whole birthday thing with Aang freaked her out, and it was playing on her mind.

When the buzzer finally went off for them to up and get out of the room, Suki was the first on her feet; Toph figured she planned to get a word in edgewise with Sokka before her next lesson. The girls packed their items into their bags and crowded out into the hallway with the other chattering students talking about their escapades over the spring vacation. With horrifying realization, Katara's face formed a twisted scowl.

She had English, with Donovan, Lydia, and Sokka.

Toph caught the expression on Katara's face and gave her friend an affectionate smack on the back. "Don't freak, Sugarqueen; Donovan's still a substandard, inept, bumbling moron unable to handle the ferocity with which you eclipse her minimal intelligence," she smirked, before rephrasing. "She's an A-class fuckin' retard. She couldn't find shit if it was dribbling down the back of her legs."

The mental image that this deployed was inescapable, and as a result caused both Katara and Suki to wince. Toph grinned even wider at their reactions. Suki put a hand on Katara's shoulder, shaking her head and smiling supportively. "Don't worry, Katara. I'm sure she'll cut you some slack, especially after all the stuff with the newspapers, and the news." She tried to delicately tiptoe around the subject of the abduction.

Katara pulled a reluctant half-smile, somewhat doubting this. "Donovan doesn't bend. She'd snap if she tried." She observed astutely, her eyes narrowing just at the thought of the woman. She wondered if Donovan was even her biggest problem; after all, things were worse with Sokka, and a lot more awkward. Plus there was Lydia, who she hadn't seen since the fight. Katara reminded herself that she had to attend detention after school all week for that fight. Even after the abduction, her homeroom teacher couldn't make allowances for that. Katara sort of understood - she'd known she'd get detention for that.

Suki spotted Sokka up ahead, walking toward the English lesson he shared with his sister. She glanced to Katara and Toph, who gave her weak smiled that she took as her cue to go talk to him. She jogged up toward him and walked beside him, her fingers tightening on her bag. She tried to think of something to say, but she had to settle for a simple greeting. "Hey, Sokka." She tried uneasily.

"Hey," Sokka answered with a brief glance in her direction.

Within three words, Suki was bored with the conversation, grabbed his arm and stopped him. "Okay, stop." She rooted her feet into the ground and settled her gaze on Sokka's. Sokka watched her with a confused expression on his face, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed. "This is fucking stupid. Things are weird between us, I get that, but there's no reason for them to be. I've got my shit sorted, and you've got yours sorted, so what's the problem?"

Sokka frowned hard at her. "Things are _never _going back to the way they were, Suki. Not after what happened to my sister," his voice was hoarse, as if he'd spent the morning yelling at someone.

Suki rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. "Look around you, Sokka, _everything's _gone back to the way it was before!" she pointed out to him, her eyes narrowed and her weight on one hip. She gave a brief laugh and turned her gaze down the hall, where she saw Katara and Toph parting ways.

Sokka turned away from her and began walking for his English lesson. Suki shook her head at his back, lifting a hand and pinching the bridge of her nose. _'Jesus fucking Christ!' _her mind screamed at her in exasperation, as she turned away from him and headed for her Spanish class. _'Why am I with that idiot again?'_ she mused, grabbing the handle of the classroom handle and stepping in.

* * *

><p>Turning back to face the front of the classroom, Katara grimaced. Sokka didn't look too happy in his seat toward the back of the room, and Lydia, right behind her, looked even less impressed. Zuko beside her had notified her with an elbow that Donovan was coming in, struggling with the awkward door-handle. The door eventually opened with a squeaking noise, protesting against the clasp in the doorframe, and the daunting sight of the burly old English substitute-turned-teacher filled Katara's mind.<p>

A grimace found its way onto Katara's face and she turned her head away from the teacher stalking toward the desk before them. She heard Zuko's chair creak as he leant back in it, and she knew by the sound that he was crossing his arms over his chest and eyeing the woman with a scrutinizing glare, his iPod still plugged into one of his ears. Eventually Katara forced herself to look to the teacher, only to see her standing over the desk, lifting a piece of paper and giving a frown.

Without sparing Zuko even a glance, Donovan extended her hand over her desk and his. "Scorsese, iPods aren't allowed in class," she cleared her throat of what sounded like grit, but what Katara thought was probably the bullshit she spewed, and put the paper down, leaning slightly to pluck up her glasses with he free hand.

Zuko removed his earphone from his ear and paused the music on the iPod, before raveling his cable around it and sliding it into his jeans' pocket.

Donovan seemed unimpressed by this, and she lifted her gaze, now wearing her glasses, to Zuko. "You seem to have misunderstood me. _Hand over _the iPod." She seethed through ground teeth.

The right eye of the scarred teen narrowed to the same extent as the left, and he opened her mouth to rasp out a calm though indignant reply of protest. "Why?"

Donovan rolled her eyes and motioned with her fingers, revealing pointed red nails to the entire class, for him to hand over the iPod. "As your teacher, I'm entitled to confiscate any items belonging to students which disrupt my lesson. I won't ask again, Scorsese."

Zuko raised his good eyebrow and gave a scoff of amused humor - something his father did often. "If you demanded my iPod on the street, I could have you arrested for trying to mug me." He tugged up one corner of his mouth in a slightly entertained smirk. "Outside of the classroom, what you're trying to do would be called stealing. But you get to call it your prerogative because you're employed as my superior."

Donovan rolled her eyes again and decided to drop it, far too annoyed to have this discussion with a student right now. She narrowed her eyes and plucked up a stout pile of papers from the desk, her gaze scanning the class for absentees. Finding none, she settled her eyes on the top sheet of paper, clearing her throat and addressing the class. "Your homework assignments, class, I recall were due in this session." She spotted a girl dozing in her seat. "Jessica, why don't you collect them and bring them to my desk?" she suggested, more of a demand than a question.

The dozing girl, Jessica, blinked tiredly and got up reluctantly, collecting the sheets of paper the other students extended to her. As Jessica did this, the door did its clicking little jig again as someone struggled with the clasp on it. It opened and a nervous face peeked in. Jin stepped into the room and clutched her books tighter to her chest, swallowing her nerves and uneasiness, slowly inching toward Ms. Donovan.

Jessica swiped up the last document from Zuko Scorsese and smacked the small pile down on Donovan's desk and retreated to her seat at the far left of the classroom. Ms. Donovan quickly flicked through the homework sheets and glanced up to Katara with a wicked sneer. "Yours isn't in here."

"Neither is mine." Jin spoke up, clearing her throat and hugging her books to her stomach with a distasteful expression on her face.

Katara swallowed uncomfortably, shifting in her seat as Donovan looked Jin up and down. "We weren't here for the assignments."

Donovan smacked the sheets down on the desk and crossed her arms over her bosom, eyes narrowing and settling on the desk before her before they lifted to Katara Marina's face, which sported a rattled, unsettled expression, bluest eyes of sky glittering with some dreadful expectancy. "I _never _put it past you, _Marina," _she spat out the name, "to cut class. I'm completely unsurprised, at _your _neglect."

Katara seemed to shrink in her seat, her shoulders drawing up and her hands on the desk before her moving back into her lap, loosely hugging her elbows as Ms. Donovan turned to look at Jin. Jin shrank even more, eyes glossing over as if she were about to cry as the teacher's words pierced the air like tiny, malicious knives.

"And _you _I haven't seen since _February. _I'll be sure to have a word with the _truancy officer _regarding your _asinine _waste of precious learning time," the woman ground her voice out, and to Jin it sounded like nails on a chalkboard all over again. "Sit. _Down._" Donovan raised a hand and pointed to Jin's long-empty seat at the back of the room, in front of Jet and Sokka.

Jin Territa nodded and brusquely walked to her seat as if her life depended on it. She grabbed the seat, pulled it out and sank down into it like Jonathan Prescott himself had told her to sit the fuck down, with a large iron pipe raised over her head. She dropped her books onto the desk and flopped her bag to the floor, unzipping it and grabbing her pencil case.

Ms. Donovan's glare returned to Katara, her mouth pursed and her eyes narrowed. "And what was _so _important, _Miss Marina, _that you couldn't be here for the homework assignment? Do you deem yourself _better _than the need to do homework? Or is it simply that you are too busy being a degenerate to attend class?"

With each word, Lydia Roberts' blood boiled a little more. How stupid could a woman be? True, she didn't like Katara Marina, but even she had to commend the girl and cut her a break after her name being thrown through the papers and slapped across the television screen for three weeks. Lydia wondered why Zuko hadn't said anything yet, though was lightly less surprised that Katara hadn't.

"You constantly disrupt my class, and then have the _gall _to waste my time in keeping yourself absent from lessons that will only aid the future of you seemingly pointless life-," she stopped herself with a furious gasp so she could continue. Katara's mouth was open to respond, but no words were able to find their way out to the world, and so Donovan continued to rant. "And don't even get me started on that _tremendously thoughtless _fight you started-,"

"Oh for goodness sake, you incompetent, ignorant _fool!_" Lydia got to her feet and snapped across the classroom at the English teacher, her voice carrying with considerable echo, effectively cutting off all words being flung across the air between them.

Donovan stared in confusion, Katara and Zuko turned in their seats, briefly exchanging glances of equal confusion, and the rest of the class looked too.

"One would expect a woman employed to teach the highest level of English in a high school to be somewhat less conceited, with a less _inflated _sense of entitlement and a better knowledge of the happenings of the city she inhabits, but _no._" Lydia moved from behind her desk and crossed her arms in the aisle between her row of desks and the next. "I suggest you go and locate the nearest newspaper and _read it." _She narrowed her beady green eyes, the blonde hair on her shoulders tousled by the air carrying from the windows. "Before you further embarrass yourself."

Jaws were hanging and eyes were bulged, and Donovan's were no exception. The woman stared for a moment before blinking erratically at Lydia. The blonde girl soon realized that everyone was staring at her, and she didn't let this bother her. After all, attention was something she adored. She just had her own set of morals, however small that set was, and sometimes she had to do the right thing. Not allowing a girl who'd already had a bit of an ordeal to listen to more bullshit was the right thing.

Donovan growled at the back of her throat and then looked away as if someone had abruptly shone a big flashlight on her idiocy. She gave a grunt of shame and them marched to the door, grabbing the handle and pulling the door to open it. It protested and she looked a right moron for a second, before she got it and marched out of the class like a tank on a battlefield.

A strange chatter scattered through the class, and Lydia took her seat again. Katara and Zuko immediately turned their back to her, avoiding her gaze. Their eyes met and they shook their heads, expressions saying 'what the fuck was that?' and they eventually turned back to face the front of the class, brows down and hands on their chins in confusion.

* * *

><p>Toph, Aang and Suki were sitting in the spotty shade of a large oak tree a couple hundred feet from the main school building, their bags at their sides. Suki was holding her phone up to get signal, trying to send a text to Yue to ask if she had succeeded in ridding Sokka of his addiction, as the Chander girl had mentioned she was doing earlier in the day. Toph and Aang were in some kind of heated debate that Suki was drowning out.<p>

"No way, Toph; they have to know when your birthday is-,"

"Yeah, well, they don't." Toph abruptly cut off the boy with the arrow tattoos. "And it doesn't matter."

"But-,"

"Drop it, Aang." Toph lifted her hands, her back against the oak tree, and rubbed her palms against her face, tired of this conversation.

Aang, whose mouth was open, ready to continue, promptly shut it and looked away. His eyes moved toward the school and he jumped, seeing Zuko and Katara running toward them, bags flying behind them. It looked like they'd gone to the cafeteria to grab breakfast this break time, judging by the wrapped ham-cheese baguettes jutting out of Katara's bag. When they finally got close enough to exchange conversation, the two were wide-eyed and confused-looking.

Zuko was the first to speak, his bag hitting the grass as he dropped it in the sunshine. "You guys are not going to believe what happened in English."

Toph tilted her chin up to pay attention as Aang and Suki were. "Not if you don't tell us, Sparky." She noted curtly, a smirk adorning her face. The colorblind girl glanced from Zuko to Katara, who was drawing out one of the baguettes and unwrapping it. Her mouth watered and she extended her hand to Katara. "Birthday toll," she called simply to her friend, who scoffed a laugh and broke off a generous piece of the baguette.

Handing the cheesy bread to Toph, Katara cleared her throat and continued what Zuko had begun to say. "_Lydia Roberts _came to my defense today when Donovan went off on me." She explained, using a hand to make a gesture of disbelief. She threw her arm up in the air, gesturing to the sky as if the next thing to happen would be a cloud falling and crushing buildings.

Toph sat up straight, brows down and her mouth agape. Why would Lydia be nice to Katara after getting her ass kicked by the aforementioned? Toph had kicked Lydia's ass, and Lydia hadn't been nice to her as a result. "You been hittin', the cactus juice, Sugarqueen?" she raised an eyebrow, lifted a hand and moved some of her raven black bangs out of her line of vision.

Zuko shook his head, reaching sideways into Katara's bag and grabbing his own breakfast from it. "I was there. It was kind of epic. I mean, it would've been, if one of us guys had said it …" He held the loose end of the wrapping paper around the baguette and held an open hand under it, before using one hand to pull the wrapping from the unfurling sandwich and the other to catch it.

"_Incompetent, ignorant fool_." Katara repeated, gesturing to Zuko in agreement. "… _Locate the nearest newspaper and read it before you further embarrass yourself,' _That was exactly what she said. And then she went back to her seat like nothing had happened," she shook her head incredulously, breaking off another piece of her baguette and then stuffing it in her mouth. Her mind mulled this over multiple times simultaneously. The whole thing had been so astoundingly alien.

"Okay, _epic, _Sparky, is the last word that comes to mind when you think of little miss Gucci-And-Prada-Had-A-Baby-And-Named-It-_Bitch._" Toph raised a hand and pointed to Zuko, before glancing to Katara skeptically. "And anyone who says a person like that can be _nice,_ is either retarded or selling something."

Aang nodded in agreement, gray eyes fixed on Katara's blue ones. "Toph's right; Lydia probably just wants you to let your guard down, so she can screw you over again."

Zuko and Katara exchanged similarly suspicious glances, somewhat able to fathom what Aang had suggested, when Suki piped up logically. "Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Lydia had grown a respect for you, Katara, after the fight. Think about it; Zuko was an ass to all of us until Aang showed him we weren't scared of him, you know, by kicking him in the nuts."

Zuko grimaced in memory, looking to Aang. "I still haven't forgiven you for that."

Aang smirked at this, before looking back to Suki. Toph interjected cynically, lifting a hand and rubbing at one of her eyes with the back of her index finger. "That makes no sense, though; Lydia just got bitchier after _I _kicked her ass. Why would Katara doing it make it any different?" she tried to bite back a pout, but couldn't.

"I don't know." Suki spoke pensively, with a hand on her chin. "I don't know the ins and outs of it, but that's what it sounds like to me." Then she shrugged and drew a pack of strawberry chewing gum from her pocket. "Either that or Aang's theory." She ripped open the packet and then popped out a block of pink gum into her palm. "Gum, anyone?"

* * *

><p>Katara and Aang were heading to the cafeteria on lunchtime, both having just escaped their shared art lesson, with their large A3 portfolios under their arms, discussing the finer details and intricacies of sketching and painting. A chatter of students milled around them, and they could hear the distinct metal noises of lockers being slammed and opened in the ambiance of the hallway. They could hear some girls laughing at a freshman who'd fallen on his face while trying to be suave with them.<p>

"I really prefer to just use pencil; paints get messy and if you make a mistake, it's permanent." Aang was saying, adjusting his grip on his portfolio.

Katara nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, but once you finish a sketch, it looks gray and dingy; everything looks so much nicer when its got some color."

"True, but I kind of like the grayness. It's dark and twisty." Aang laughed, humored, his eyes falling on the door into the library coming up on their left, where two teenagers were trying to suck one another's faces off through their mouths. Aang believed it was known worldwide as 'French kissing', but in the moment it looked more like an act of cannibalism.

"Ugh, I've had enough 'dark-and-twisty' to last me a lifetime." Katara replied with an amused smile.

Walking past the door into the library, both teens looked in and stopped short when they recognized two people leaning over a desk. Both were in a cluster of blue and purple clothes, and tanned skin. Aang soon recognized Sokka leant over a book and Yue leant over his shoulder, reading past him and offering him one of the Reese's peanut butter cups in her hand.

"Oh come on, you dope; you _love _peanut butter cups." Yue grabbed around his other shoulder for his mouth and used two fingers to pry open his mouth, while using her other hand to shove a peanut butter cup into his mouth. It initially squashed against his pearly whites before he allowed his jaw to open and he took the chocolate into his mouth. Yue grinned at this. "Yummy." She commented enthusiastically. "Right?"

Sokka laughed while chewing, and nodded. "Yeah, yummy." He agreed with a full mouth, lifting his eyes from the book on the table and meeting Yue's, the first smile he'd worn in a while adorning his face. Okay, she was right, he loved peanut butter cups. He allowed his face to split into a grin, chocolate smeared on his front teeth.

Yue gave a laugh and turned her head away from him as she did so, the image of his brown-spotted teeth bringing her to chuckle so hard the muscles of her stomach clenched painfully. She drew out another peanut butter cup and popped it into her mouth, struggling not to laugh it right back out.

In the doorway, Katara smiled at Aang, glad to see her brother smile for once. "Come on, let's go. I'm starving." She nudged Aang in the upper arm, moving toward the stairwell down toward the cafeteria.

Aang's eyes followed her for a moment, but he didn't move, his brows coming down as he looked into the library. Usually girls were the ones to notice when something was up, something like he was suspecting right now. Yue and Sokka were unusually close, skin brushing … how could Katara not have suspected? Maybe she did, maybe she just didn't want to say it aloud. Either way, something funny was up with Sokka and Yue.

"Hey, wait up, Katara!" Aang turned his head from the library and ran after his friend.

* * *

><p>"Is it just me or is it weird to be back in school?" Suki asked, sat at their usual cafeteria table, thankful for things to be back to normal. She grabbed a French fry from her plate and dipped it in the glob of ketchup on Toph's plate, before popping it into her mouth and moving her eyes from her plate to Aang, across the table.<p>

"Weird how?" Katara plucked one of the potato snacks from Suki's plate and smacked it into her mouth gracelessly, tasting the leather of her fingerless gloves as she did so. The gloves had once been Suki's, but much like the leather pants, Katara had inherited them.

Suki thought about this for a moment; she didn't know exactly how it was weird. "I don't know. For starters, Sokka's not here to make crappy jokes that we all logic-defiantly laugh at, and then Katara's single, but that's old news …"

"Yeah, not for long." Zuko smirked, glancing to Katara and picking up his orange-juice box, taking the straw between his lips and suckling up the sweet juice.

Katara rolled her eyes. "Keep dreaming," she laughed, reaching across the table to him and grabbing the juice box right out of his hand. She clutched it to herself and noisily slurped up the rest of it. Zuko frowned childishly and then stuck his tongue at her, mourning the loss of his orange juice. "Prince Zuko the Evil Spawn."

"Says the daddy's girl who just stole my orange juice." Zuko's arm extended across the table and his hand grasped for the gooey chocolate-chip cookie on Katara's tray, his ass losing contact with his seat as he did so.

Katara was too quick for him, snatching the cookie up before he could get at it, standing and holding it up above her head. "Ah-ah-ah!" she teased. "Can't touch me," she smirked, imitating Peter Griffin. She waved a lone finger in a windshield wiper motion as if scolding a child, leaning forward to loom over Zuko.

Zuko's eyes moved down from the cookie to Katara's magnificent bosom, leaning ever closer to his face and he allowed a smirk to find its way onto its face. Before he could say something, Katara had slapped him in the face, put her hands on her hips and glared down at him. He brought a hand to his face, looking up innocently. "What was that for?"

"I told you not to do that."

"You said I couldn't stare at your ass."

Katara rolled her eyes and sat down, tossing the cookie his way. "You're annoying."

Zuko broke off a piece of the cookie and popped it in his mouth. "You have no idea how _annoying_ it is to follow the 'look-but-don't-touch' rule, then," he challenged, chewing the gooey cookie and savoring the sweet taste.

Aang piped up at this. "Yeah, that's a bitch," he agreed, between slurps of his apple juice.

Toph glanced sideways at him. "What? I don't have that rule."

Aang nodded sagely and blinked slowly. "Yeah, but I _did, _however, have to wait six months for your parents to go out of town so we could -as Sokka would put it- do the nasty-nasty,"

Zuko respectfully extended a hand to Aang to shake. "I still can't believe you waited that long, man; you're a fucking superhuman."

The boy with the tattoos shook Zuko's hand with a laugh and then glances to Toph. "It was worth it." He leant to her and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Happy birthday, Toph."

Green eyes examined him, scrutinizing. "You'd better hope to God I don't withhold epic birthday sex for that comment."

Aang pouted and the others laughed, all of them donating their treats to his tray in mock pity. Suki grinned and founded a new charity called 'Cookies For The Chaste', all of the others patting her on the shoulder for it. Eventually Aang admitted that his birthday gift would make her have to have sex with him, and they all applauded his brilliance. When the excitement died down, Suki spoke again, addressing everyone, still laughing at the back of her throat.

"Anyway, guys; when was the last time each of you got _completely _**shitfaced**?" she grinned deviously, holding several fries between pampered, manicured fingers.

Zuko was the first to reply. "What, is this a competition?"

Suki nodded. "Yeah, whoever has gone the longest without getting fucked up gets completely _wasted _tonight."

The boy with the scar gave a chuckle as a result. "Okay, well, I loose already; I was so drunk I was _singing _at that seedy old bar downtown … I can't even remember what it's called … back when I found out Lydia tried to bullshit me into thinking she was pregnant."

"Singing?" Toph raised an eyebrow. "Singing _what?"_

Zuko shook his head shamefully. "Harry Nilsson, one is the loneliest number."

With a chortle, Aang decided to second his friend. "Last time I got pissed … uh, back when me and Toph were having that little off-period, I think. I climbed out my window, on my roof and howled at the moon." He blinked slowly, reminiscently.

Suki decided it was her turn and patted Aang's arm, knowing she could beat that. "Like, six days ago, I was wallowing in self-pity in my bathroom on way too much red wine, singing with a toothbrush as a microphone to 'I Will Survive'." She smirked, before looking to Katara and Toph. "That just leaves you two."

Toph and Katara exchanged thoughtful glances. "It was after the woods, right?" Katara lifted a hand to her chin.

"Yeah, we drank whiskey." Toph agreed, before bringing her brows down. "But you weren't drunk."

Katara raised an eyebrow. "I was." She protested calmly.

"No, you were sober enough to walk."

"I was still fucked, though-,"

"You totally were _not, _Katara."

"I totally was-,"

Toph cut her off, a grin spreading on her face as she jumped to her feet and put the heels of her hands on the table before them. "You weren't drunk, and that means the last time you were pissed was all the way back at Chan Nakoma's party, before Lydia joined the school, and that means you're getting absolutely _legless _tonight; I demand it, as the host of the party!" she threw an arm in the air and pointed to the sky challengingly.

Katara opened her mouth to protest, but Suki threw and arm around her. "Don't worry, Katara, I'll make sure nobody takes _advantage _of you." Suki grinned, before glancing back to Zuko and sticking her tongue out at him.

The blue-eyed girl's eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms over her chest. "This is going to suck."

Suki sighed an agreement. "Harder than a four-dollar hooker."

* * *

><p>After the last lesson of the day, all who planned to go to Toph's birthday party met up in the school's parking lot, around Suki's car and Zuko's bike. Kids were walking in swarms toward the bus bays, and a loud chatter was steaming off them. All grouped in the parking lot, it took them a few minutes to come to the conclusion that no further snacks needed purchasing, and all the presents had been taken cake of beforehand, and were sitting at Toph's house.<p>

If Toph's parents hadn't been busy at some kind of real estate convention in Los Angeles, they wouldn't have been able to have the party at the house. Originally having planned to go straight from school to Toph's house, they instead went to Vinny's ice cream parlor for some ice cream to kill some time.

They all slid into a booth, on one side, Aang, Toph and Zuko, and on the other, Katara and Suki. A few minutes after sitting down, they were all sat with their ice creams, talking about the past.

"Do you remember when we went to the roller rink in the city?" Aang asked, a mouthful of Cheeky Caramel Chimp ice cream causing his voice to come out over a chilly breath and a full mouth. "And that Enrique Iglesias song came on?"

Suki grinned and whispered promiscuously in imitation. _"Let me be your hero, baby …"_

Toph reenacted what she'd said in that moment, rolling on the waxed floors and dancing with Sokka - just because they were bored and had nobody to dance with. "Ew, no," she licked at the ice cream on her lower lip; banana split was her favorite, but she still didn't like it to sit on her lip like when people wore a milk moustache out of ignorance. Then she grinned. "And then Sokka fell down laughing and chipped his tooth on the floor," in memory she shook her head. "He has an annoying, snorting laugh."

Suki nodded in agreement. "Like that old entrepreneur guy who hangs around at that expensive car dealership on Gilead Avenue."

At this, Aang raised a lone finger, sagely. "That 'old entrepreneur guy' happens to have a name, and it's 'Bumi'."

Zuko scoffed. "No way. _Bumi? _That sounds like someone who spends their life in their mother's basement putting together bombs with old Star-Trek figurines - it doesn't even _sound _real. You made that up," he accused, rolling his eyes and then staring Aang down across the table, the straw in his ice cream soda held between his thumb and forefinger. "You _totally _made that up."

"I shit you not," Aang raised both his hands and held them open innocently, as if showing a store clerk he hadn't stolen anything.

"That's bull, who told you that?" Katara spoke up with strawberry ripple ice cream in her mouth and a disbelieving look on her face.

"I asked the guy."

"Oh, come on, seriously?"

"I swear to god," Aang smiled truthfully, before toying with the spoon in his ice cream, and then shoveling a crunchy mouthful of it into his head.

Suki sat up a little straighter and pointed at Zuko, an expression of amusement on her face. "Oh! Do you remember when you pulled the fire alarm for a prank and everyone got to get out of class and stand out in the rain?" she blinked her blue-green eyes at him, lips parted, entertained by this memory.

Zuko raised his good eyebrow. "That wasn't a prank, I was on fire," he shut his eyes and explained simply, calmly and wisely, feigning insult at her comment.

"Well whose fault was that?" Toph leant her elbows on the table and licked her ice cream from its bowl, unable to be bothered to use the spoon.

"How was I supposed to know how much fire Mai's lighter gave off?"

"You have a strange record for getting set on fire," Aang narrowed his eyes as he watched Zuko, as if wondering if Zuko had some kind of fire fetish.

Zuko squinted at Aang incredulously. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" he laughed at his bald friend. When Aang shook his head and didn't answer, Zuko turned back to his ice cream and proceeded to suck it through the red bendy straw he had _requested_. His eyes suddenly widened and his lips released the straw as he coughed against his own will.

Katara couldn't stop herself from laughing at him, nearly dropping her face into her bowl of strawberry ice cream. He choked on the rainbow sprinkle he'd inhaled through the straw, smacking his own throat with a scowl on his face, and by the time he gained his composure, hacking at the cold, choke-y feeling in his throat. "Serves you right!" she would've elbowed him if she'd been next to him, and settled for shaking her head and wiping at the tears of laughter.

"Yeah, Zuko; Karma's a bitch," Toph shook her head at Zuko, a half-smile of a smirk on her face.

Aang's face was buried in the crook of his elbow, and he was still laughing. He lifted his head and looked to Zuko next to him, sniggering.

"What?"

"Last week-,"

Zuko's eyes widened and he snapped at the bald kid. "Shut up, Aang."

Katara caught on and grinned. "Last week Zuko let me-,"

"Katara!" Zuko held out a hand in a motion that said 'don't go there'.

Katara wore a shit-eating grin as she looked Zuko in the eye and stayed silent, patting her hands on the table in a cheerful rhythm. Zuko glared daggers as her lips thinned against one another and she nodded reluctantly, sighing with an expression that mimed 'dude, you suck'. "Zuko's a meanie," she pouted, crossing her arms over her chest childishly. "He won't let me tell my friends a funny story."

'_Not when the story ends with me in a skirt' _Zuko thought to himself, rolling his eyes and scooping at his ice cream with the spoon-end of his multi-purpose bendy straw. "I'm fucking abusive, aren't I?" he asked sarcastically, his eyes fixed on his cold snack, the one that had nearly choked him, and he scowled.

"Aye, and I'm going to call the wife-beaters hotline, so I am," Katara smirked across the table.

Zuko's ears perked at her using the regional terms of Mejis, in Mid-World, the hometown of Susan Delgado; the early love of young Roland in the Dark Tower series. "How far are you into 'Wizard And Glass'?" he raised his good eyebrow at her, still poking at his ice cream. 'Wizard And Glass' was the fourth book in the series, and Sokka had only recently finished with it.

"Well, I've met the weird lesbian witch lady, and … I've met Roland going by the name of Will Dearborn, and I've met Susan Delgado, and she kissed old long-tall-and-ugly, except he's not long-tall-and-ugly, he's young-bright-and-perky but still very Roland-y, and I've met Eldred Jonas …" she paused; who was it that called Roland that? It was Eddie, right? Old long-tall-and-ugly.

Zuko pointed at her to illustrate his next words as she looked aside to think for a moment. "Jonas is a bastard. He's a little shit," he shook his head; he meant it, Jonas was a pain in the ass, an outcast of the gunslingers guild of Gilead. "Hey, I thought you were reading 'Hearts In Atlantis'," he frowned in confusion. "You should really read 'Low Men In Yellow Coats' before you read 'Wizard And Glass', otherwise you won't get the Crimson King references."

"I already read it. It had _some _references, you know, 'all things serve the beam', and that, but the best thing about it was probably when Bobby sent Harry Doolin home with a _fuckin rupture_." She smiled briefly at Zuko, remembering the little redhead boy beating the shit out of Doolin, after Doolin and his boys had beat up Carol Gerber. "That was really sweet."

The Scorsese boy opened his mouth to reply, but Toph interrupted by reaching and clapping her hand over his mouth so fast the cut on his lip where Sokka had punched him last week opened up again. "Guys, none of us know what you're talking about," she gestured with her free hand to Aang, who was watching them with narrowed eyes of confusion, and then to Suki, who had one brow raised in wonder.

Katara's face fell slightly and she gave a blush of nerdy embarrassment. "Oh. Sorry, guys … we're talking about Stephen King's Dark Tower series," she cleared her throat and shoveled in a spoonful of ice cream.

"Sounds neat, but I have no fucking clue what either of you just said," Aang pulled an apologetic face.

Zuko's face formed a dry smirk and he rasped his reply back. "That's because you wouldn't know good reading if it snuck up behind you and ass-raped you."

Aang continued to smile genially, his face betraying no disgust at Zuko's crude insult. "I hope I never meet good reading."

* * *

><p>Night had ceased to creep up on you while you weren't looking by this time in the year; winter had come and gone, and spring had sprung upon the earth, and more importantly, on the Dahlia Coast. The richness of the air outside was long forgotten when the gang collapsed to the softest carpet for miles, the one of Toph Bei Fong's gigantic bedroom. The presents were stacked up on the large coffee table before the chaise lounge, which looked out a large bay window to the sea, and the snacks were all on plates atop the presents, so that the gifts made a sort of pedestal for the food.<p>

"Okay, movies first, or presents … or drinking … or … we could go fuck around in my fathers gym?" Toph wondered aloud, her face buried in one of the throw pillows that never quite made their way to her bed.

"I think we should start drinking _now, _so that by the time we play Truth-or-Dare, we're completely trashed," Suki suggested in a robust tone as she sat up, resting her back on the wall, smacking the step-button of the floor lamp at her side and snapping the light on.

Aang stood up from his spot on the luxurious carpet, all shoes forgotten downstairs, and approached the mini-fridge under Toph's desk, in the space where three drawers were supposed to be, but instead a mini-fridge with an unassuming front panel sat. He grabbed what looked like the handle of a draw and pulled open the mini-fridge, revealing many bottles of vodka and Budweiser. In the back, there was a single bottle of champagne too, to boot, and there was a large bottle of Pepsi in the door of the fridge. Aang imagined Toph kept that to go with the bottle of Jack Daniels she kept in her bedside drawer.

Zuko and Katara sat up and looked into the fridge from their spots on the carpet. Toph stood and dusted herself off, smirking at Aang as he drew out the drinks.

"Hold onto your hats, gentlemen. It's going to be a bumpy ride," Toph grinned, quoting Bette Davis and grabbing an old DVD from her haphazard pile beside the wall-mounted television. She eyed the tape of 'Winnie The Pooh' with a horrified expression on her face. "What the fuck?"

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Part one of a two-part birthday special! I gots to go watch tv with my mom! I've been really sick lately, that's why I haven't been able to update! But it's okay, I'm going to inflict my illness upon one of the characters just to be a bitch. Also, I want to scare someone with a spider. I went to climb in my bed and a huge spider crawled out last night. Bleugh. Then I went to get my brother to kill it, and we couldn't find it. It'll show up again. I know it.**

**Also, you ever find something in your room that's totally not yours, and you know it's been there forever and you don't know why? I found a lego man in my room. What the fuck? Lego? SRSLY? And I like people swearing. It's fun. Hold onto your hats, gentlemen, because there's ganna be TRUTH OR DARE! And there's gonna be a SPIDER! And there's ganna be something even FUNNIER! (on the note of the Sukka/Yukka thingymabob), fucking HILARITY is on its way!**

**REVIEW!**

* * *

><p>Aang raised one hand to his throat and pressed on it, and in a raspy, deep voice, he began his line. <em>"Not with Miss Ellen's portieres, not while I got breath'n my body!"<em>

Toph screeched at him. _"Great __**balls**__ of fire! They're my portieres now!"_ she waved her arms in the air as if pulling the curtains down and wrapping herself in them. _"I'm going to Atlanta for that three-hundred dollars, and I've gotta go looking like a queen!" _Toph approached the vanity at the edge of Suki's room.

"_Oh yeah? Who's goan' with you?"_

"_I'm going alone."_ Toph answered snobbily.

"_Dat's what you think! I's goan' with you - with you and that new dress!"_ Aang put his free hand on his hip.

Toph paused and tilted her head to smile at him_. "Mammy, darling."_ She answered in a singsong voice.

"_No use to try'n sweet-talk me, Miss Scarlett, I knows you since I been put'na pair diapahs on yas! I say I's goan' wit'chu and goan' I is!"_ Aang finished, before removing his hand from his throat and swallowing the dry feeling in it. "Fuck, that hurts your throat." He coughed quickly, before taking a bow at their applause.


	9. Like A Spider

Toph opened the DVD case to find a double-sided disc with no label, only a post-it note stuck to the inside of the case that said 'Happy Birthday, Love From D'. Toph Bei Fong grimaced at this; she hated how Dana had been able to get the gift into her house without alerting anyone, and she wondered who Dana could've possibly hired and trusted to do such a job for her, considering she was far too busy with other matters to do it herself.

Eventually, Toph settled for a humorless laugh as she slid the disc into the player on the shelf beneath her television set. She grabbed the remote, turned on the TV and stepped back, her eyes fixed on the screen. The others watched her in silence. A face suddenly found its way to the screen; a red-haired girl with green eyes and freckles, and a smarmy smile that mimicked Toph's norm.

"I was going to sing you a song, but I know you, and that would only irritate you. You're probably pissed that I got this in your house while you were at school, but I kinda … don't care." Dana grinned on screen. "Anyway, the other side of this disk contains the software you need to piece together the theoretical 'device' we were talking about online. If you manage to get the right hardware for it, and it works, I'll be really fucking surprised. Also, there's a patch for the F-001's Bluetoothing problem. Happy Birthday; I do not envy you the hangover you will have in the morning."

Toph gave a weak smile and shook her head, pressing the 'eject' button on the remote and approaching the DVD player. She plucked up the disc and put it back in the case. She meant to speak her thoughts aloud, but she'd recently become more and more self-contained; probably because of the many things she was trying to keep Aang from finding out at the current time, most of them to do with Dana, some of them … perhaps not. She said nothing, while thinking something along the lines of _'You never change', _in regards to her red-haired friend.

Speaking of Aang, he was handing out the small vodka-bottles to his friends while murmuring how he didn't really like vodka. Toph grabbed hold of Aang's collar, only moments after he'd handed the second-to-last bottle to Zuko, and she snatched the final bottle from him. "Come on, then, Twinkletoes; let's see this 'gift of epic proportions'," she smirked at him, releasing his shirt and freehandedly removing the top of her vodka.

Aang smirked and turned toward the pile of gifts and snatched one from the top; one wrapped in pale green paper with a yellow sticky-ribbon on it. Toph eyed it and recognized it as a box-shape, taking it from him and frowning at it. She wondered for a moment if it was safe to shake it to see what it was, but then decided against it. "It's probably not as good as I made it out to be," Aang tucked his hands into his pockets and smiled weakly at her.

Toph slid a finger into one of the well-wrapped seams of the paper and tore the paper away, looking down as the paper tore away to reveal the backup hard-drive she'd been talking on the phone to Dana about three nights ago, while she thought he'd been asleep. She stared, her eyes becoming wide. "Where the fuck did you find one of these?" she turned to him with an expression of awe on her face.

He shrugged nonchalantly and gave another brief smile. "I know a guy," Aang answered simply, knowing she wouldn't buy it but she also wouldn't question it. The truth was, he _did _know a guy, but he'd met him while shifting from one foster home to the next, a few years back in Oregon. He had risked a bit by contacting his friend, but for Toph, he'd risk a lot more.

Toph smiled warmly and set the box aside, shaking her head, opening her mouth to say something only to be interrupted by her own sharp ears. The large front door downstairs was clicking open, and in the doorway, two people were talking snobbily about some 'wonderful summer home' on some 'gorgeous island, and the views, my god!' that Toph cared very little for. The blind bandit glanced to Aang with a look that told him to stay silent, and then she repeated this look to all the other faces in the room.

She stalked to her bedroom door, pulled it open and walked out into the hallway. She leant over the rail and peered down the brightly lit stairs to see her parents walking into her father's study. She sucked herself back to the door of her bedroom and pressed her back to the wall beside it. _'They were supposed to be in LA all night!' _she cursed in her head. As soon as her parents saw the shoes left at the bottom of the stairs - she'd only been lucky they hadn't seen them in the first place - they'd be all up in her face about having boys over for a sleepover. Her mother would then exclaim 'on a school night no less!' and Toph would have to bite back the urge to spit on her mother.

"They're back," Toph whispered, only barely loud enough for them all to hear, as she walked back into her room. "They're not supposed to be back, but they're downstairs," she met Suki's blue-green eyes with an expression of sadness, and an air of bad planning.

At this, Aang and Zuko exchanged conspiring glances. "Someone needs to go get the shoes," Aang told his friend with a small nod that Zuko took with regard as a request. Zuko got up and stealthily left the room, initiating his Blue Spirit mode. Aang then addressed Toph. "Is there a chance of them leaving again?"

Toph raised an eyebrow. "Doubt it," she replied dryly, eyes fixed on the floor.

Zuko returned with the shoes at this point, and dropped them all soundlessly to the bed. The door bounced off the frame and caused a loud clicking, scraping noise to find its way out of the hinge. Toph cringed and turned to glare at Zuko, who was obliviously looking to Suki, who was getting on her feet. Katara and Suki had exchanged meaningful glances and were collecting up the drinks from their friends, only to hide them in the space under Toph's desk, where nobody would see them on a simple glance.

Toph heard footsteps on the stairs; two pairs. Her cringe turned into a scowl and she felt her expression darken as her parents came into the doorway. Her mother was holding a gift box with some ribbon on it to keep it closed. Her eyes narrowed; she had been hoping they'd forgotten about her birthday. _'But Dad didn't forget. Dad __**never**__ forgets.' _Who could forget the day their life had been ruined by a colorblind, nerdy little girl in place of a healthy, sporty little boy?

Poppy Bei Fong's face drained of her faux excitement as she saw people - whom she didn't know particularly, other than Katara, who she knew as 'Lao's-friend's-daughter' - all strewn around the room with placid and cold expressions on their faces. "Oh. I was unaware you were having guests, Toph - if you'd told me I'd have-,"

"What do you want?" Toph asked sourly, her eyes fixed on the carpet.

Lao frowned at this, and Toph was glad she hadn't seen it. "Don't snap at your mother like that, young lady."

Toph didn't answer, but looked up to meet her father's glare.

"We came to wish you a happy birthday." Poppy spoke brightly, though it was forced, and extended the gift toward her daughter.

Toph took three precautionary steps toward her mother and took the box. She watched the older woman like she watched unfamiliar poker opponents - wary, watchful, and observant. If Katara had better understood the relations between Toph and her mother, she might have compared it to that between Bobby Garfield and his mother Liz, in 'Hearts In Atlantis'. Poppy gave another faux smile that made the now-fifteen-year-old girl's skin crawl.

Thinking about her age, Toph wondered when Aang's birthday had been; she knew Aang had turned fifteen sometime in the last few months, but she didn't quite know when because he refused to celebrate his own birthday, perhaps because he himself didn't quite know when it was. Some information was simply lost when you were jumping across borders from home to home. Poppy's smile wavered as she looked from one child to the next, around the room.

"Er … do you plan on all sleeping in the same room tonight?" she cleared her throat politely.

"Yes, we do." Toph answered adamantly.

Poppy's eyes widened for a moment, but then she returned to her normal stature and she licked her lips to revive her lip-gloss. "Girls and boys in the same room? Isn't that a little … precarious?"

'_Precarious', _Toph considered scoffing, _'Say what you mean, woman; it's casual - and we all know how much you hate for things to be anything short of a black-tie event.' _But she stayed silent on these thoughts and opened her mouth to say something a lot calmer, only to be interrupted by Zuko, who stepped in, despite not being on the Bei Fong's good side for being Ozai Scorsese's son.

Zuko had found himself conveniently at Aang's side, and so he grabbed his friend around the shoulders, his face splitting into a shit-eating grin that betrayed none of the awkwardness in his stomach. "I know what your thinking, but you're like, _totally _wrong. Me and Aang are _together," _he put his free hand on his hip and stuck it out femininely, giving a wink at Poppy Bei Fong. "Like, you know, _soul mates," _he couldn't resist but add.

Aang's face was a picture at this point, but in a second he played along and pouted girlishly and fluttered his eyelids in a manner he perceived to be feminine, and he lifted a hand and put it on Zuko's chest, turning his knee in so his hip stuck out in the same girly way Zuko's did, lifting his foot from the floor.

Katara and Suki struggled not to snigger, keeping their faces straight; they attributed this skill to their vast and varied poker games with the great Toph Bei Fong. Aang made some kind of girly giggle that made it harder for them not to laugh, but they stayed true to their purpose. Toph's somber expression stayed the same, though in some corner of her mind she was howling in laughter.

Poppy Bei Fong's eyes widened for a moment in horror - pure and unadulterated - but then she simply screwed up her face and frowned. "Oh. Well then … I … guess that's alright," she murmured in a tiny voice, her snobby attitude somewhat depleted. She then glanced to Lao and blinked slowly at him, before looking back to Toph. "We just wanted to wish you a happy birthday before we go to the opera - we're seeing Carmen with Arnook Chander - and I can see the celebration is … underhand."

Aang took this as his cue, earlier not having thought about how strangely his decoration of the room would come to his aid. "Oh, definitely; I put up the banners myself, you know."

Poppy made only a reluctant smile and a nod, which she gave to all of them, before turning to leave the room, abashed. Lao eyed Toph again, in that way that made her skin want to crawl right off her muscles, but she looked him in the eye and betrayed none of her nerves. Zuko and Suki both recognized the stare with which she met her father. The tiny smirk on Toph's face had disappeared, and she was simply staring defiantly at her father.

"Don't make a mess. And if you plan on skipping school tomorrow, you can forget it," Lao Bei Fong tilted his head so he was looking down his nose at her. "If you need the guards, you need only call. We'll speak tomorrow."

He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, shutting the door with a gentle click that reverberated in Toph's head despite its simplicity. She exhaled a long breath as if she'd been holding her air, a grin appearing on her face, her shoulders deflating as the tense nervousness left her body. She turned and saw Aang and Zuko stood next to eachother, no longer touching, with their hands in their pockets and huge grins on their faces, sniggering laughs trying to find their way past their throats.

Toph beamed at them, shaking her head. _"Like, you know, __**soul mates**_," she repeated, eyeing Zuko proudly.

Zuko's head gave a brief jerk to one side and he clucked sidemouth, winking smugly. He didn't explain his actions further than this; he didn't need to.

Aang rocked on his feet, hands in his pockets, the proud grin on his face a window right into the excitement in his stomach; formed at the moment Zuko had grabbed his shoulder and begun to speak in that strange Azula-imitation he did when the situation called for it. Only once - now - had that imitation proven helpful. Hell, once it had gotten Zuko punched in the face by some guy at a bar. Zuko had been very drunk and pretending to be gay, and had smacked the guy on the ass.

Aang and Sokka had been with him. They had been unable to resist a cackling laughter.

"Yea, and there was much rejoicing at the gayness of Zuko and Aang, and mass consumption of alcohol followed, and then there was an orgy the likes of which the world had never seen-," Suki was cut off when Katara smacked her in the arm for making fun of the Dark Tower series.

Katara grinned widely and grabbed her vodka from under the desk. "To Toph," she raised her bottle high in the air. "The Blind Bandit."

Suki grabbed the rest of the vodka and passed it around.

"Here, here!" they all chorused.

* * *

><p>The gang rolled out sleeping bags on the floor. At this point, they were sure Lao and Poppy Bei Fong were long gone, and any noise they made would be ignored by the guards, as it had been a few hours since Poppy had given her daughter the gift which sat unopened on the floor by her bed. They had watched a movie, 'Every Which Way But Loose' - but there was still a tension in the air that came with the gift by the bed, but while everything else was casual, nobody dared ask Toph to open her mother's gift.<p>

Night had fallen dark and thick around the mansion, like a blanket around a dollhouse, only visible through the windows. The lights were dimmed and Suki relaxed on her sleeping bag, Aang and Toph on the bed, and Katara and Zuko were collecting empty vodka bottles, drunk to the point of dizziness, but not to the point of stupidity. Toph sat up on her bed and eyed them thoughtfully.

Then she glanced to the small, empty, walk-in closet that Zuko was almost close enough to fall into, if pushed the right way, and if the door was open. The fifteen-year-old grinned, remembering a game of 'Seven-Minutes-In-Heaven' she'd once played with Sokka. Seven minutes had proven only long enough for her to discover how stinky Sokka's farts were. She grimaced at the memory, but smirked at the prospects of her walk-in closet.

It was a small closet, small enough that if she shoved two people in there, they'd be chest-to-chest and face-to-face. Between Katara and Zuko, it would be so awkward it would be _hilarious. _For this prank, Toph would need an accomplice, and Aang wouldn't do because he was so … well, neutral … so she extended her foot and kicked Suki gently in the arm - the older girl lying on the floor on her sleeping bag. Suki sat up and turned her head to look at Toph. Aang didn't notice, because he was busy sifting through DVD's in his hands.

Toph pointed to Zuko and Katara and mouthed secretively. _"Seven Minutes In Heaven."_

Suki's brows came down and she looked to Katara and Zuko. After a moment a knowing grin spread on her face and she climbed to her feet, tucking her hands in the pockets of her Capri jeans. The auburn-haired girl stalked toward the two collecting the empty bottles, walked past them and opened the secret mini-fridge, taking another bottle of vodka and shutting the fridge after herself. "Hey, Katara?"

"Yeah?" Katara replied, dropping two bottles into the bin by the door into the en-suite.

"Have you ever seen Al Pacino in 'Scent Of A Woman'?" Suki asked as Toph got to her feet and strolled calmly to the door of the closet.

Zuko stood straight, holding three empty bottles in one hand, and looked to Suki. "I have."

"Is it good?" Katara wondered aloud.

"It's great - Pacino does this great speech at the end about how leaders should have integrity," Suki uncapped her drink and brought it to her lips.

Toph opened the closet and peered in as if she were looking for something. She looked up and saw a top shelf, a grin finding its way onto her face as she set her sights on the cardboard box that sat on the shelf. "Hey, Sparky, could you grab that box for me?" she asked sweetly, stepping out of the way of the closet.

Zuko turned his gaze from Suki to Toph, and then he peered into the dusty closet with a grimace. There were many cobwebs clinging to the bottom of that upper shelf, and the floor was littered with dust bunnies. Some old stuffed animals sat on the floor of the closet - which looked like it had once been used for the storage of clothes - and an ancient set of toy teacups were strewn on the floor too - he noticed this as he approached the closet. Zuko nodded at Toph and reached up for the box on the top shelf. It was a high shelf - he was reaching high over his head and standing on his toes to get at the box.

Katara stepped up behind the Scorsese to have a look at the derelict closet. There was something about it that reminded her … she tried her best to stray from that train of thought, but the mind doesn't work like that … of the basement in her house; spiders and cobwebs and big, ugly, rodents; dust, moths and bird nests and old party décor, brown cardboard boxes of old Christmas bling, and a robot of Santa Claus that was supposed to sing. She shuddered - she fucking _hated _spiders, and moths, and rats … ugh.

Then, Suki's hand came flat into the small of her back and she went sprawling into Zuko, knocking him into the closet. He gave a shout of surprise and snatched his hands back from the box to put out in front of him, to make sure his face didn't connect with the back wall of the closet. "Hey!" he yelled, startled, as he smacked into the back wall of the closet, before giving a grunt on impact of Katara whacking her forehead right into his back.

"Ow!" Katara yelped, clapping her hands to Zuko's back to push back from him, only to find her back making immediate contact with the door behind her. Her eyes widened in the dark, and she turned awkwardly to find a handle for the door. She found none. "Toph! Let us out!"

The two could hear laughter on the other side of the door. They could no longer see the dust bunnies under their feet, or the tea set, or the stuffed animals. There was no light-switch in the closet, just as there was no light in it. Katara pounded her flat hand on the door, to find it was locked. She gave a low grunt of annoyance and unease. Zuko had to lean over her to hit the door, and struggled to keep respectable distance from her in such a cramped space.

"This isn't funny!" Zuko yelled out with a raspy groan of irritation.

Katara stepped back from the door and crossed her arms, finding her back pressed against Zuko's chest. He stood straight to try to allow her some space, but they ended up bumping against one another again. "Sorry-,"

"Hang on a sec-,"

"Ow! I'm stuck-,"

"…-Well, maybe if you could just stay fucking still-,"

"-Me? How about you? Ah! Ow! My hair! Get off-,"

"I told you to stay still!"

The two ended up propped up against opposite walls of the cupboard by eachother, their breathing somewhat labored and their eyes searching the darkness, probably for one another so they could glare daggers at eachother. There was a moment of silence as they tried to decipher what to do next, since it looked like they'd be stuck in the closet for a good seven minutes now - that was how the game worked. Then Zuko gave a breath of irritation.

"I can't see anything," he murmured into the dark.

Katara gasped in mock surprise. "No, really?" she asked sarcastically, trying to force back the image in her mind of spiders … and moths … and rats … _ugh. _

Zuko rolled his eyes in the darkness and reached into his jeans pocket, drawing out his lighter. "Hold back your hair, I don't want to accidentally set you on fire," he instructed dryly, bringing the lighter up into the minimal space between them and pulling his head back so he could keep himself from the flame.

Katara reached up and held her hair back, pushing it over her shoulders and settling her bangs behind her ears, her head cocking backward to stay back from the flame she was sure her friend was about to light. "Okay," she murmured a reply, blinking slowly in the darkness.

For a moment, when Zuko's thumb clicked down the button on the cheap lighter, all he saw was fire-lit blue eyes and soft tanned skin. Katara looked gorgeous, her hair pushed back behind her ears - he wondered why she didn't wear it like that more often - and then he saw the big black blob in between them, and he realized why her blue eyes were so wide and her face was draining of color.

A large, thick spider hung between them on a line from the shelf above. You know how some spiders have really thin legs and tiny bodies, but really long, far-reaching legs? It wasn't one of those spiders. It was a spider with thick black legs and an even thicker body. In the light of the flame it danced above, Zuko could even see the light bounce off the arachnid's multiple eyes.

An involuntary shiver ran down Zuko's spine, and he made a sound that portrayed this shiver, his hand letting go of the lighter and his hands racing to his sides. He tried to jump back, but he couldn't. Katara's scream did nothing to soothe his nerves. The light went out between them, and Zuko heard the lighter clapping on the floor at their feet, as his face morphed into a comical grimace, as even in the dark, he knew the spider was dangling in front of him.

"**Spider!" **Katara screamed out in the dark. **"SPIDER!" **She repeated, this time louder. **"Let us out! Spider!"**

After his initial shiver went away, Zuko's grimace fell back into a stoic frown. "Stop screaming - its probably more afraid of us than we are of it," he tried to calm her.

Katara raised a hand and put it on his chest, as if she were pushing the spider away. This action caused Zuko to be squeezed between her hands and the wall behind him. He swatted at her hands, only to feel - with sickening realization - that he'd batted right through the spider's web. He gave a shout of his own as the spider fell right onto his forearm. He couldn't see it, but it was on him, crawling with thick, hairy legs. His shout got louder and he screamed.

"**Get it off! ****GET IT OFF****!"**

Katara proceeded to smack at him blindly, trying to whack the spider undeniably climbing on her friend. Her expression - though invisible - was one that mimicked a person who'd just bitten into a lemon. Her hand made contact with the spider, and she was sure it came free of Zuko, relief and disgust both washing over her face. Zuko breathed a sigh of relief, just the same, but Katara was more interested in knowing where the spider was. "Is it gone?" she panted.

"I think so," Zuko breathed slowly, blinking in the darkness.

"_How are you two lovebirds getting along in there?" _Toph cried from outside.

Katara rolled her eyes and yelled back. "You're a fucking sadist, Toph!"

The two trapped in the darkness heard only laughter in reply to this - sick, creepy laughter that made them shake their heads - and they both drew in and exhaled heavy breaths that smelled of vodka and dust. Zuko very much doubted the spider was gone - spiders were relentless, and they came back even after you shook them out of your jacket and threw a schoolbook at them. This made his expression harden.

"I fucking _hate _spiders," Katara cringed. She thought on her own words - perhaps her hatred of spiders had been the motive beneath calling Meng and Lydia 'Spiders'.

Zuko agreed silently, looking down for the spider, even though they were blind in the darkness. Katara's hand still rested on his chest, and he could feel its coolness through his long-sleeved, dark gray shirt. _'Has it been seven minutes yet? Are there spiders in heaven?' _he mused to himself, discreetly enjoying the feel of her palm on him. Despite being alone in the dark with Katara, he really didn't like being in this cramped little closet.

* * *

><p>"<em>It's okay, Azula. Mom's okay," Zuko whispered to his sister, under his breath, trying to soothe her and fool himself at the same time.<em>

_Azula, whose face was buried in her older brother's chest, was five. Zuko was seven, clutching his little sister protectively and unwilling to let anyone hear them hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. Every time Ozai turned on Ursa, Zuko always feared his father would turn on him and Azula. He always grabbed his sister by the hand and tugged her into the closet, shutting the door and holding his breath._

_Azula whined into his chest. "I don't like it in here!" she sniffled, tears drying on her face on in Zuko's oversized t-shirt - a hand-me-down from Lu Ten._

"_I know. I know." Zuko breathed heavily into the black locks his face was pressed against. "We can go to the park after …" he didn't finish, because the rest was finished for him. Azula knew what they were waiting for, despite being so young. She knew what her father was doing - why there was yelling around her, muffled by walls and her brother's body. She didn't understand it, but she knew what it was._

"_No we can't," Azula cried into Zuko. "I don't want to leave mommy here on her own."_

_Zuko silently agreed - he could do nothing to protect his mother, but leaving the house would feel as though they were abandoning her, even if she told them it was okay. Ursa would have probably preferred if they'd gone, to be away from the yelling and thumping and screaming, but they wouldn't. Zuko's grandfather had once told him that what kept a family like theirs together was loyalty, not love. Zuko didn't see the difference until he realized Ursa stayed with her husband as a result of loyalty, not love._

_With a sigh, Zuko's grip on his sister tightened. "It's going to be okay."_

_Azula, in a voice the first hints of who she would later become, snapped dryly at him, momentarily pulling her wet face from him. "When?"_

_Zuko frowned at the realization that he didn't know when. When would his father finally snap and end Ursa's life? When would they be sent to live with Uncle Iroh? When would they ever be able to walk the floors of this house and feel safe? When would they be able to look their father in the eye without feeling like crying? Zuko didn't know these things, but he knew the word in each question was 'We' or 'Us'._

_He focused on reassuring his sister and gave her an answer he himself didn't believe. One day that question of 'when' would be answered, the day his mother left, and the day his face was thrust onto a gas-hob stove on the highest setting, and the day he tried to commit suicide. Those days would do their best to answer his questions._

* * *

><p>When the door opened, Zuko realized he'd been leaning against it, as did Katara. They tumbled out in a knot of arms and flailing legs, Zuko falling onto his back and Katara falling on top of him. Toph and Suki were cackling madly and Aang was shaking his head disapprovingly - all three of them were holding bottles of Budweiser. Katara looked up from her perch atop Zuko with a hot pink blush on her face and an expression of surprised embarrassment accompanying it.<p>

Zuko propped himself up on his elbow and glanced up to Katara, then looking to Aang, whose disapproving expression was now one of amusement. Zuko frowned at Aang and looked back to Katara, only to see something black moving on her pale blue skinny jeans. His eyes widened at the sight of the spider - sitting calmly on one of her ass cheeks. Almost thoughtlessly, Zuko raised a hand and smacked down on the spider, causing Katara's eyes to widen and her brows to come down harshly.

She stared down at him with a painfully poisonous glare that caused his blood to run cold, though her expression was still one of surprise. Only at this poisonous glare did Zuko realize he'd just _smacked her on the ass. _His face fell into horrified fear and she narrowed her eyes at him. "Did … you just … _spank _me?" she asked him, shock in her voice.

Toph sniggered, and Suki bit back the huge smirk on her face. Aang shook his head, bringing a hand to his face and stifling his laughter.

Zuko found his voice, after a long moment of staring at a _seething _Katara. "No!" he sputtered nervously, then recanted. "I mean yes! But-,"

Then he felt the warm, icky insides of the spider smooshed on his fingers and palm, where he'd smacked it between her firm ass and his hand. He weakly raised his hand to show her the squashed spider on his hand, as a replacement explanation. Her blue eyes moved from his gold ones to the squashed spider on his hand, disgusted mortification washing over her face. She stared at it for a moment, and then - oh, god, it was so disgusting - the disfigured, half-squashed spider's legs _moved._

Katara nearly puked, jumping away from Zuko and off of him, clambering to her feet and clutching her stomach at the same moment Zuko stared at his own hand, truly grossed out. The spiders legs - the ones that weren't squashed - were clawing at the sky as if there was something it could grab to fix itself up. Zuko grabbed the doorframe of the closet he'd just fallen out of with his clean hand and got to his feet, before lifting up the lid of the bin by it and scraping the spider off on its edge. The Spider, detached from his fingers, fell into the bin and died. The top of the bin fell closed and Zuko shuddered, stalking into the en-suite to wash his hand.

The birthday girl, at this point, was in tears, nearly spilling her beer as she laughed wildly. Katara pouted as Toph and Suki continued to fall back onto the bed where they were sat and laugh like witches. Even Aang was giggling, his face covered by one hand. Suki sat up and wiped her eye with the back of her hand.

"Oh, god, Sokka would've laughed his ass off at that," she shook her head, only a little sadness betrayed by her expression.

Toph grabbed her own phone from her pocket and tapped a sequence of buttons. _"I've been alone with you inside my mind … and in my dreams I've kissed your lips … a thousand times. I sometimes see you pass outside my door … hello? Is it me you're looking for? I can see it in your eyes … I can see it in your smile … You're all I've ever wanted, and my arms are open wide …"_

Suki smacked Toph, and then they were all laughing again.

* * *

><p>"Drink! Drink! Drink!" The others chanted as Katara inhaled from the tequila bottle Toph had produced literally from nowhere. No, seriously - there had been no tequila in the mini-fridge <em>at all. <em>Katara should really have been more curious as to where the bottle had come from, but at this point, she was only barely able to sit up because Suki's leg was behind her back. Aang was holding the bottle over Katara's mouth, and the spout was dispersing the tequila into Katara's mouth.

She shut her mouth to swallow for a moment, and the drink splashed off her chin onto her top, which was already somewhat wet from all the other drinks she'd had pouring into her face and onto her body tonight. At this point, she was severely confused. She was sure they'd watched another movie since the closet incident, and she'd spanked Zuko in retaliation for spanking her, and some other stuff … but as of yet, she was far too drunk to even decipher how drunk the others were.

As Toph had promised, she was _fucking wasted. _She drank at the tequila again, her eyes squeezed shut tightly. Aang suddenly took the bottle away and handed it to Toph, who took it, though surprised. Katara opened her eyes and swallowed again, looking up at Aang in confusion. At his concerned expression, her mouth split into a huge grin. "Whass'wrong, Aangie?" she cooed aloud, reaching up and grabbing for his arm, missing badly.

Zuko laughed down at her, shaking his head and grabbing for the wall, finding himself swaying on his feet. "Yeah, Aang - whass'wrong?" he added in the same tone.

Aang rolled his eyes, realizing he was probably the most sober of them at this point. "If we give'er any more she'll fucking … drown herself," he reasoned, his own intoxication getting the better of him.

"No I won't … I promise!" Katara blinked cheerfully, that grin somehow widening.

Aang shook his head and sat down on the bed, finding himself extremely dizzy. He looked to Toph, who was turning to face him. All the presents were now opened, and wrapping paper was strewn everywhere. Of course, the box from Poppy was unopened. That was a given. "Hi," he smiled warmly at Toph, finding his eyes moving across her curves.

Toph grinned and strolled over to him with the tequila bottle. "Does baldy McTwinkleToes wanna wet'iss'whistle?" she purred happily, standing before him.

Aang scoffed a laugh. "My whistle is wetter than the titanic," he blinked up at her.

Toph laughed at this and set the bottle down on the nightstand by the large king-size. Leaning down and brushing her lips against his, she whispered. "We _could _go elsewhere, you know …" she offered coyly.

Aang laughed mischievously at this idea. "We have guests," he pointed out.

Toph groaned in annoyance. "When'ere'_you'_plannin'on'thaddepic'birthdaysex?" she slurred childishly.

The gray-eyed boy smiled softly. "When everyone else passes out," he reasoned drunkenly.

Suki snapped her head up and grabbed for the bottom post of Toph's bed. "We're not gonna be passing out any time soon," she pointed out stubbornly.

"Mmmm … see?" Toph smirked, her lips a mere inch from his.

"Still."

Toph groaned and pulled away from him. "Okay guys … now we're'gonna play truth'r'dare, everybody got it?" she grabbed the back of her couch and crouched for a moment, before hopping her legs over the couch's back and landing on it in a lounging position. "Come on, gather round …" the couch made a smack of a sound as she flopped onto it.

The others approached and sat around the coffee table, on the sofa and two armchairs that looked out the bay window over the sea. Aang and Toph sat beside one another, and Toph draped her legs over her boyfriend, her feet on Suki's lap. Katara and Zuko sat on the two opposing armchairs. Suddenly the air thickened, as if there was something hanging between the five of them. As if there was a secret they all knew but didn't know the others knew. It might have been serious if they hadn't been so drunk and giggly.

"Okay, who goes first?" Zuko asked with a smarmy smirk on his face.

"Have a guess, genius …" Suki yawned from her spot on the couch.

Toph threw her arms up and grinned, before putting her hands behind her head. "I go first, because it's _my _birthday, and _I'm _fifteen. So; Suki, truth or dare?"

Suki lifted her hands and rubbed her face, feeling brave. "Dare."

Toph thought on coming up with a dare after that. Suki was pretty athletic, so a physical dare would be fitting, but then Suki was also drunk, and an inappropriate dare would also be fitting. "I dare you to … grab Katara's boob."

Suki smirked. "For how long?"

"Five seconds."

"Done."

Suki got up and stalked over to Katara, who was just sitting like a lump in her seat, her arms draped over the arms of the chair. Katara grinned up at her friend. "Eenie meenie minie moe …" she stuck her chest out openly, carelessness on the blue-eyed girls face unmatched by any other. Suki's hand plodded down on Katara's left breast and the two just stared at eachother in strangely casual boredom for five seconds.

Suki then let go of Katara's boob, bowed comically and stalked back to her seat, dropping down and smirking at Toph, who applauded their bravery. Suki took this as her cue to make the next dare or ask the next question, and so she crossed her arms over her chest. "Aang, truth or dare?"

Aang looked up to the ceiling, considering this a moment. "Truth."

"What's the freakiest thing you and Toph have done during sex?"

Aang's face turned bright red, but then again, that might've been to do with the alcohol in his system. He tilted his head back even further, the softness of the couch caressing his neck and head as he did so. "Uh … one of my moms called while we were - you know, _bizzay_ - and I had to talk to her for a whole three minutes before she would hang up."

Zuko was the first to laugh at this - it had happened to him once, except it had been his sister on the phone. By god, that had been awkward, especially when Azula had asked to speak with Mai. Holy shit, his sides were beginning to hurt with how hard he was laughing. Aang watched Zuko for a moment before smirking.

"Alright, then, Zuko - truth or dare?"

Zuko wiped his good eye and looked at Aang. "Dare," he laughed bravely without hesitation.

Aang had been planning to ask Zuko the same question Suki had just asked him, but now he had to think of a dare. Aang glanced to Katara, who was drunkenly watching Zuko with a girly smile on her face, as if she were picturing him doing something naughty to her. "I dare you, Zuko Scorsese … to …" he paused for a goofy grin of his own, "give Katara a lap-dance."

Zuko's smile wavered at this. "Huh?"

Katara just continued to grin, with perhaps a little more enthusiasm. Toph grinned, proud of the bald teen beside her, and spoke up. "It's not that hard, Sparky - some gyrating, a little grinding, maybe a butt-smack …" she illustrated these points with enthusiastic hand motions that made Zuko want to puke. "Sugarqueen might even slip a couple dollar bills in your waistband if you do a good job."

"I don't know how to _do _a lap-dance," Zuko eyed Aang unwillingly. Doing a lap-dance went way past his boundaries - fuck, he'd already pretended to be gay tonight, what more could they want from him? Sure, if he knew how to do a lap-dance, for Katara he'd do it, but he wasn't going to make an asshole of himself just for their amusement.

"Alright, alright … take of your shirt and stalk toward Katara singing 'Sexy Thing' by Hot Chocolate," Aang compromised, with a grin.

Zuko stared for a moment. "Tell me you're joking."

"And put some enthusiasm behind it - sing it like you mean it," Aang added deviously.

Suki interjected. "Because Katara's your 'sexy thing'," she held up a lone finger sagely. She spent way too much time around Sokka.

At this, Zuko shook his head in disbelief and gripped the arms of the chair, using his arms to throw himself up to his feet, swaying on his feet for a moment. He looked at Aang in disgust, before glancing to Katara, who was watching him hopefully. He shook his head again and stormed out of the room, his hands doing something that looked like tucking his hands into his pockets.

The others exchanged estranged glances of disappointment. It would've been awesome to see Zuko gyrating, or at least serenading Katara. That would've been YouTube-Worthy. That would've been one of those things they'd say to Sokka _'You had to be there' _after.

Then, suddenly, Zuko burst into the room shirtless, with his shirt hanging like a towel from his waistband. The others sat up straight and watched him in surprise. He held his arms out and jerked his head one way, tossing his hair the way he'd seen Justin Bieber imitators do. In a singing voice that was half comic, half serious, and all sexy, he began to sing, his eyes fixed on Katara as he forced down a goofy smile. _"I believe in miracles, where you from? You sexy thing!"_

Katara clapped her hands to her face and bit back her laughter. Toph and Suki whooped at Zuko like fan-girls, pumping their fists in the air in delight. Aang watched in surprise - he hadn't actually expected Zuko to go through with it. He supposed the scarred teen was drunker than he'd originally thought.

"_I believe in miracles, since you came along, you sexy thing!" _Zuko continued, tossing his head like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, and beginning to stalk toward Katara in his sexiest walk. Katara let out a wolf whistle as he did this, before clapping her hands childishly. She was possibly more surprised by the fact that he knew the lyrics to the song, than she was by the fact that he was going along with Aang's dare. _"How did ya' know, I needed you so badly? How did ya' know, I'd give my heart gladly?" _he recited, complete with the cracking voice. _"Yesterday, I was one of a lonely people, now you're lying next to me, making love to me - oh, I believe in miracles, where you from? You sexy thing!"_

Zuko was interrupted when the bottom cuff of his jeans snagged on the coffee table between them and he went sprawling to the carpet. His face found its way to the floor and he looked up, having succeeded in making an ass of himself. Katara grinned down at him and lifted her feet onto his back, using him as a footstool. "Stay where you are, farm boy."

Zuko rolled his eyes. "As you wish," he scoffed, before dropping his face back to the floor.

"Good show, Zuko. It's your turn to choose who truths and who dares …" Suki's bare foot smacked him on the small of the back.

Turning his head so his mouth wasn't in the carpet, he took his turn. "Katara, truth or dare?"

Katara thought on this for a moment, with her feet rested on Zuko's upper back. The dares in this session were apt to be pointless and embarrassing - much like the titty-grab and the sexy-thing-dance - so she supposed to choose truth was the better choice. "Truth," she drawled drunkenly.

Zuko got his elbows under him so he could look at Katara, and she took her feet from his shoulders. "Where did you learn to shoot?"

Toph and Aang murmured in approval. "Good question," Toph nodded with a curious expression on her face, turning her head to look at Katara.

Katara gave a brief, weak smile. "Uh … a few years ago, my dad had a handgun. He got it after my mom died, to protect us. When he went to work … I used to play with it. I used to … shoot birds, and stuff," she explained darkly and carelessly. "I was going to use the gun for the suicide attempt - of course it wouldn't have been just an attempt then - but my dad locked it away because he realized he was running out of ammo."

The others stared at Katara.

"What? You wanted an answer."

"Alright, alright, Sugarqueen - take your go," Toph waved a hand at her friend. "Yeesh - a choice between blowing your brains out and convulsing to death. There's a choice for ya. That there is when you know your life is fucked up."

Zuko glanced to Toph. "She had more creativity than I did, at least."

"This is a really morbid discussion," Aang spoke up awkwardly.

"No kidding," Suki agreed.

"You said it," Toph shook her head.

Katara made a moaning kind of grunt of an 'ugh' noise, and rolled her eyes as if she were about to pass out, her eyelids threatening to close completely as she did this. Her lips parted as she grunted this sound of annoyance, and she snorted, seemingly simultaneously. "Alright, Suki, truth or dare?" she drawled out, her hand forming a kind of claw as if she were reaching for an invisible bottle of beer.

The auburn-haired girl jutted out her lower lip as if she were going to enthrall her friends with a thrilling, philosophical lecture on to be or not to be, to truth or not to truth, to dare or not to dare. Her eyes scanned the ceiling as if she were waiting for divine knowledge to be bestowed upon her. "I think I'll go for a dare," she sighed contentedly.

Katara grinned impishly. "I dare you to tell us-,"

"Ah-ah-ah, that's against the rules!" Aang piped up with an accusing finger pointed at Katara.

Katara moaned another breath of annoyance. "Fine, fine. Suki, I dare you to …" she narrowed her eyes thoughtfully at her friend. Katara tried to search her mind for the best thing to dare Suki to do. Then she remembered that Suki was with her brother, and they were having a fight, and also that Sokka loved sex. She knew this because she'd heard her brother on the phone to Jet exclaiming how amazing Suki was in bed. Katara imagined Suki would strangle Sokka if she knew that. "I dare you to go make up with Sokka."

At this, Zuko rolled onto his back and agreed quite enthusiastically, but it was not out of place because both Aang and Toph piped in the same. Suki stared at Katara for a moment before looking away as if she were considering it, even with Aang, Toph and Zuko agreeing at her with _conviction. _She really did want to give Sokka a piece of her mind right now, and she was drunk enough to fucking do it, too. In fact, she was just about ready to end things with him.

"You know what? I'll take you guys up on that one," Suki nodded calmly, pushing Toph's feet off her lap and pushing herself to her feet. Once she was up, she was dizzy. She took a few graceless steps to the wall and leant against it. "But I'm taking another bottle of vodka with me."

"Walk, don't drive," Zuko reminded her, lying on his back and watching her sagely.

Suki nodded as if she didn't need to be reminded of that. "Have fun, guys. I might be back, if he rejects me … or something. You know how it is …"

"Don't we just," Aang sprawled himself into the space where Suki had just been, so he and Toph took over the couch.

Katara pointed up at Suki with an authoritative expression on her face. "And don't get mugged," she told Suki, as if she were telling a child not to write on the walls.

Suki gave a nodding agreement that was nondescript, vague and somehow upper class. She dragged herself against the wall to the desk where the mini-fridge was stashed, and leant down to open it, snatching up a bottle and kicking the fridge closed. "Mugged …" she repeated pensively, "I'd scare a mugger away with that inherent 'bitching' Sokka's always on about," she murmured critically.

"Bye, Suki …" Toph called in a singsong tone.

"Bye," Suki sang back, moving to the door and then disappearing.

Then she returned for her shoes, grabbed them up and stuffed her feet into them. She waved a final goodbye to her friends, before strolling out the door with her vodka and singing Kanye West's 'Heartless' in a nonchalant, careless voice that one might compare to the sound of a meowing cat. The others looked to one another, realizing Suki hadn't passed on her turn of 'Truth-Or-Dare'. They eventually decided that since their last game of 'Truth-Or-Dare', or 'Spin-The-Bottle', or whatever, had ended badly, they'd quit while they were ahead, and before anyone was offended.

The night air blew in through the window, reminding them all of the existence of the rest of the world. Toph eventually got up and opened that bottle of champagne. They all shared it, drinking from the bottle, and then Aang turned on the radio to find that 'Kidz' by Take That was playing. So they all got up and 'La-la-la'd along with it, dancing (if you could call it that) in a jumping manner that included a lot of bumping into people. Zuko conceded that he found that song somewhat depressing, but then Katara reasoned that he spent his days listening to 'Fall Out Boy', '30 Seconds To Mars' and shit like that.

Then, when they were all danced out, they hit the floor without even turning off the radio, and fell asleep. Cake was to be the next morning, when Toph - much to her father's distaste - stayed home from school. By that time, they would have hangovers so bad, they wouldn't even be able to fuck around with the candles.

* * *

><p>Suki let herself into the Marina house. The guy that worked the main gate knew her as Sokka's girl, so there were no problems with that, but by the extra guy at the door Suki knew Hakoda had tightened up on security since the kidnap. She also knew the guy at the door, so she had no trouble getting into the house either. She walked up the stairs with that vodka bottle in her hand, only a few sips taken from it, admiring the décor of the hacienda.<p>

She passed Hakoda in the hall and gave him a polite smile that he returned with the same politeness and a hint of amicability. She knocked on Sokka's door, but then walked in without a word, to see Sokka sitting on the foot of his bed in the creamy white bed robe she'd bought him for Christmas. "Hey," he frowned at her.

Suki sighed and stepped in, closing the door with one foot and holding the vodka bottle a little looser. "I feel terrible. Our relationship is ending."

Sokka tilted his head down, deep blue eyes fixing themselves on his carpet. "Yeah," he murmured in reluctant agreement with a dry smack of the lips.

Suki approached and sat down next to him and took a sip of her vodka. She looked at the bottle after sipping, and breathed out at it. "It's all my fault," she noted to herself, as if she hadn't realized it before. She would later reason it couldn't have been her fault, but at the time he'd been sitting on his bed looking pathetic, and she'd wanted to blame herself for it.

Sokka screwed up his face and stared hard at the space between his bare feet. "Mmm," he agreed wordlessly.

He reached for the bottle in her hand and took a sip of it, his eyes fixed on the floor. After he took his sip, he looked up to the wall, and then glanced to Suki, his hand held on the bottle tightly. She smiled weakly at him. Things were sort of dark now between them - he knew all of her demons, and she knew all of his, and yet to step away from one another seemed the right thing to do at this point. It felt like splitting away from herself, Suki mused in her own head. Her ears then picked up on the consistent 'whoosh' noise of the shower in the en-suite, as it came to an abrupt end.

The bathroom door opened and pretty, tanned skin strolled out in nothing but a white towel, clinging to a lithe frame and held only by dainty little hands with pampered fingernails. Suki would later compare her distinct _lack _of wealth to Yue Chander's distinct _possession _of wealth. The blue eyes that watched Suki for a moment widened and an expression of surprise came over Yue's face. There was a silence in which Suki stared at Yue, and then glanced at Sokka.

"Oh … well … this is awkward," Yue swallowed, as steam left the bathroom behind her, and she adjusted her towel around herself.

Sokka's face was a personification of defeat and he exhaled his air as if it would take him somewhere else. He took a long blink at the wall and clenched his teeth - this was just his luck. He made no move to look at Yue; he knew she was there, but instead focused on keeping his eyes trained ahead of him. He was woken up when the vodka bottle was taken from him - quite calmly - and Suki took a sip of it to hide the smirk on her face.

Taking the bottle from her lips, Suki breathed a satisfied wisp of air away. "I feel much better now," she twitched up the corner of her mouth and stood up. Then she left, her own self-worth very much re-instated. She no longer felt the need to blame herself, because now _she _had the high ground. Sokka was a cheater, and she was drunk and happy. "I feel _a lot _better now," she added, as she left the room and left for home, to change her Facebook status.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: LAWL. Stolen right out of Grey's Anatomy. But, OH, the drama. I have been toying in my head with the next bit of drama to introduce. This one will make Lydia look like a piece of cake. Can you say 'manipulative, scheming fuck'? Whoo-wee! Also, I watched 'Scent Of A Woman' last night, and I loved that 'Hoo-ah' scene. Unfortunately, I need to get off the computer because my mom is yelling her fucking head off, probably because it's 1:47AM in the morning.**

**I was going to have another Z/K kiss in this, but the smack on the ass … Oh, hell, I was laughing my ass off just picturing it. Besides, the whole thing has gotten too casual (you know, the ship?) especially with that 'Katara's single - not for long - keep dreaming' thing I did last chapter. I was just rolling with what came to me, but I do sort of regret it. Zutara isn't about casual romance. It's about angsty, twisty, dark passion. Wow, that sounds like a porno.**

**Also, I'm going to delve into ZUKO'S demons this season! I KNOW, RIGHT? Last season, Katara nearly lost her mind, and this season, Zuko's under my knife! Muahahahahahahahahahaaa! You have no idea how bad it is for your keyboard to write 'Muahahahahahahahahahahahahaaa' really fast, by the way. How did you guys like that taster of what's to come? With Zuko and Azula under the stairs? I liked it. I imagine Ursa's return would bring up those kind of memories for Zuzu.**

**Okay, guys. Here's a look back at a great scene in LILABOC history! ^_^ It's a whole scene because I'm proud of it. From chapter 14, 'Aero'. I don't know if I invented Backpack Sledding, but it sounds like fun. Probably can't find a slope to do it on, because water settles at the lowest point it can, which means for there to be ice on a slope, you know …**

* * *

><p>At the back of the school, there was a road blocked off from the students because it was completely iced over. It had originally led to a parking lot, but no cars had been able to get to it in the snow. So this lunch hour, the Gaang did what they liked to call 'Backpack Sledding', on that downhill road to the student parking lot. They grabbed hold of a backpack, pressed it to their stomachs and jumped to the snow and ice, sliding the whole way down.<p>

As Sokka and Aang raced down the slope, Zuko leant against the brick wall of the school, his arms crossed and one foot up on the wall. His ego was bruised, not unlike the spot under his jaw where The Painted Lady had pressed the gun just a little too hard. It hurt, but not nearly as bad as the thought of being beaten by a girl. The worst had been the way she'd manipulated him. She'd beaten him through the cheap tactic of flirting.

If what she did the night prior could be called Flirting.

"Hey. Why are you sitting here moping?" Toph approached, munching on a chocolate bar.

Zuko looked around. Nobody was listening. "Got my ass handed to me last night."

Toph grinned. "Yup. Not really, but you failed to stop the robbery because your manhood got in the way." She gestured casually below his belt, before taking a large bite of her chocolate bar.

Zuko wondered how girls could so casually talk about sex, like it was an everyday subject. "Yeah, if you want to put it that way. You should've seen her in action though … she was a woman on a mission." He shook his head in thought. She had been. Perhaps she had only needed to commit one crime, and he wouldn't need to face her again. He hated wanted to avoid her; she was magnificent to behold.

"Ah-huh. In leather pants. Gotta love that, right Romeo?" Toph turned and pressed her back against the wall beside Zuko, giving him a little nudge in the side with her elbow.

Zuko gave a tiny wince as she caught one of his bruises. "Yeah." He answered absentmindedly, his mind torn between thoughts of The Painted Lady and thoughts of Katara, who was laughing in amusement at Sokka and Aang returning from the bottom of the slope with snow covering them from head to toe. The Painted Lady was sexy, admittedly, but Katara was beautiful. And, well … she was Katara. She was amazing, and friendly, and sweet and kind … it was impossible _not _to love a girl like that.

Toph followed Zuko's gaze to the blue-eyed girl taking a bag from Aang. "Okay, Sparky, while you write a romance novel in your head, I'm going down that road." Toph reached out and patted him on the arm whilst walking away, toward the slope. "Hey, toss me that bag!" she yelled out to Sokka.

* * *

><p><strong>Yup. Poor Zuzu. He needs to get laid, methinks. I think Katara does too. But things aren't straightforward for them two, now are they? Yep. Also, if you guys had to pick who was gonna get fucked with this season, who would you pick? Katara or Zuko? Because, Lydia was sort of more targeted at Katara. I kind of think Zuko should have an enemy this season. Still haven't decided if this *ahem* 'blast from the past', is gonna be male or female, but I'm shifting towards male. Hell, is the next chapter the TENTH? I think that means its time to introduce the new antagonist! YAY! Still gots to decide what to do with Lydia tho … hmm …<strong>

**ALRIGHTY THEN! REVIEWS ARE THINGS TO THROW AT SPIDERS! BIG ONES ARE MORE LIKELY TO HIT THEM!**


	10. Old Fiend

"_Goooooooood morning, Dahlia Coast! It's gonna be a beautiful, glorious sunny day with ranging averages between forty and sixty degrees from Nine AM to Five PM, and it's days like these that make you think it's still Spring Break! Not to worry, though, not long until summer vacation rolls around! Today we have an amazing track list-,"_

"**AGH!" **Zuko screamed, flailing to turn off the screaming voice of the radio announcer on his clock radio. His sheets came away from him in his kicking fit of panic, and he reached a little too far for the alarm, his whole weight forcing him to go sprawling to the floor with a heavy thump on the carpet. With a mouthful of black carpet between his lips, he grumbled some kind of insult to the radio announcer.

How the fuck could people be so happy at six in the morning?

"Shut _up, _you stupid loudmouth …" he sat up and reached, his hand smacking down on the top of the radio a little too hard, causing it to give a squealing spark and a whining kind of a 'pop' noise. He grimaced - he'd need to replace it before he went to bed tonight, otherwise he'd never be up tomorrow. It was apparent that today wasn't his day. He wondered if he should crawl back into bed and wait for Friday, but then he shrugged the appealing thought away, clambering to his feet, groping for the handle of the bathroom door, only to knock something off his dresser.

It really wasn't his day.

He smacked on the light in the bathroom and looked out the window to see the sunrise on the horizon. Thus his first smile of the day appeared. He groggily went to the toilet to do his business before washing his hands and pulling open the mirror-cabinet above his expensive, off-white porcelain sink with gold embellishments to grab a razor and some aftershave.

"Zuzu?" Azula's voice came from the doorframe of his bedroom.

"In here," Zuko called to his sister, proceeding to begin his shave.

Azula walked into the bathroom and crossed her arms with a shiver, drawing her shoulders up. She was still in her red and black playboy pajamas, though she was usually up before him. By her expression, she wasn't happy. Her hair was not yet brushed out, judging by its knotty, messy appearance, and she looked as though she hadn't slept long last night. "You're up early," she stated coldly.

Zuko raised his good eyebrow, spraying shaving cream on his jaw. "You look like shit," he replied calmly and plainly, not moving his gaze from the mirror to her as he spoke.

"Oh, well then, fuck you too," his sister screwed up her face and shot him a threatening glare.

Zuko sighed and set down the can of shaving cream. "That's not what I meant, Azula. _Why _do you look like shit?" he gave her a glance, expecting her to laugh at his shaving-cream-covered chin. She didn't laugh.

Her eyes narrowed, but she then gave a tired groan and shook her head, eyes falling downward. "I was up late. Studying," she added, an easily plausible lie. Zuko wasn't too good at knowing when she was lying, so she figured she'd get away with it.

Zuko frowned. Hard. Azula was a prodigy at everything she did; she never needed to study, or practice. "No you weren't."

The scarred teen, shaving away the stubble on his skin until it was smooth and soft, breathed a long breath of tension. He shut his eyes and ran the razor under the faucet for a moment. He heard the pads of Azula's pampered fingertips pattering against her upper arm.

After swiping away the dry feeling on her lower lip, Azula's face set in its usual, nonchalant expression and she refused to speak anymore.

Zuko brought the razor back to his face and sliced off the last strip of stubble beneath his ear, before smirking at himself in the mirror and tidying up his shaving kit. He grabbed his toothbrush and squeezed some toothpaste onto it, ran it under the cold water and then turned off the faucet, sticking his green toothbrush in his mouth, between his cheek and teeth. He turned to face Azula, lifting a hand to scrub the toothpaste into his pearly whites.

Then she decided to talk, just about something else. "The washing machine is dead, so Consuela had to go take some laundry to the launderette. That means no big breakfast until the repair guy comes later on. We have Captain Crunch, though," she suggested.

Zuko grunted. "I hate Captain Crunch. It sticks to the roof of your mouth," he said, taking the toothbrush out of his mouth to speak to her.

"You're not supposed to chew with your _tongue, _Zuzu, no matter how famous your kissing skills are."

"Shut up," he hissed, before sticking the toothbrush back in and scrubbing ferociously. Azula made a joke in her head that a man with a reputation as a good kisser couldn't go around with stinky breath, but she dared not say it aloud, especially with him so volatile. Zuko's mind dwelled on trying to counteract his bad luck today. He had a really bad feeling about going to school.

Today really wasn't his day.

* * *

><p>Aidan Riker drowned out the voice of his 'tour guide', looking around disinterestedly. Dahlia Coast Public High School looked the same as any other school to the untrained eye, but Aidan was looking forward to rehabilitating himself to the standard the public expected of him, especially in this school. He wondered if his old friend would recognize him now, and this brought a smirk to his face. The old woman droning on in front of him was beginning to run out of breath - she said something about those stairs being incredibly steep, but really, Aidan just thought she was a fat old mass of carbon that could do to use stairs more often.<p>

"Excuse me, lady … I forgot your name … but er, are we going to wander around all day?" Aidan interrupted the woman from her tour-guide speech.

With a start, the tour-guide stopped, turned and looked at him. "Oh," her brows went up. "We're actually on our way to fetch your guide for the day, just until you have a class schedule of your own, you know," she smiled briefly and gave the taller boy a wary glance.

Aidan smirked dryly and said nothing, as the woman reached for the door on her left. She leant into the room and said something to the teacher of the lesson, who said something else that he didn't catch. He hadn't really been paying attention anyway. It was Thursday. He'd spent the last three days in a small, empty room that was probably used for detention on Saturdays, completing some tests so the school knew where to place him, and by today, he was pretty irritated.

The elderly woman in front of him - he hadn't bothered to memorize her name - shut the door into the classroom and stepped back from it, as if in wait. Aidan figured this meant his new guide would be leaving that classroom any second. He stepped back too, just incase the door swung both ways and whacked him in the face. After a half minute of waiting, the door opened and a teenager walked out with a backpack on one shoulder, a mop of black hair and a furiously prominent scar over one eye.

'_Looks like I've lucked out today,' _Aidan thought to himself smugly.

When Zuko looked up and scowled at the teacher for sucking him out of one of the few classes he enjoyed, he saw Aidan standing there with his arms crossed and a smarmy smirk on his face, and his eyes widened. The smirk on Aidan's face widened the same and the women between them began to speak.

"Zuko, this is Aidan, Aidan, this is Zuko - you'll be joining him in his lessons for the remainder of the day, until we get yours underhand, alright?"

Aidan nodded charmingly at the woman between them. "Got it."

Zuko tugged on one of the muscles of his upper lip in a deep scowl. "Sure, whatever," he agreed darkly. "It's not like I have a fucking choice."

The teacher would've said something about his language, but she had other things to do. "Good. Let's not have any more _threatening_ people, then, Mr. Scorsese. Be a good example. And the same goes for you, Riker. Dahlia Coast High doesn't take ruffians lightly - best you remember that," she reminded them.

"Takes 'em hard and dirty and without lube, then," Aidan laughed at his own joke, causing Zuko to roll his eyes at the vulgarity of his ex-best-friend. Next to this comment, Zuko's swearing was positively charming. Aidan patted the short, elderly woman's unimpressed shoulder.

Mrs. Hunsecker, for that was the woman's name, raised one eyebrow at Aidan as if to show him she was in no way bothered or offended by that statement. "Charming," she stated plainly, before glancing to Zuko. "Keep him in line, will you?"

Zuko pulled a face but nodded. The woman glanced warningly to Aidan before walking away. Zuko turned his back on the leaving woman and began to walk in the other direction. Aidan followed Zuko, and as soon as they turned a corner, Zuko grabbed Aidan by the front of his jacket and shoved him against one of the walls at his disposal. The thud resounded through the empty hallways, and Aidan's mad cackle echoed against everything around them.

"I was expecting a hug, Zuko, but I guess this'll have to do instead," Aidan spoke in bemusement, after his cackling had ceased rather abruptly.

"Give me one good reason I shouldn't hurl your sorry ass out one of these windows," Zuko snarled viciously, referring to the second-story windows in the walls around them. He adjusted his grip on Aidan, to the point that his hands would leave bruised in the chest of the boy in his clutches.

Aidan tossed his head, raven-dyed locks flopping out of his black-lined eyes, and smirked at Zuko. "I'm your best bud. Best buds don't throw eachother out windows," he spoke sweetly, as he lifted a hand - which was gloved in fingerless, stripy gloves - and patted Zuko on the upper arm as if to say 'at ease, soldier'. This only earned him another shove against the wall, but he didn't react at all.

"You were my _best bud _right up until you gave a twelve-year-old a chest needle full of adrenaline. Right until you manipulated a _twelve-year-old boy _into killing himself by heart attack," Zuko growled in a raspy voice, eyes narrowed and teeth ground against one another. "When did you get out of juvie? What fuckin' _retard_ let you out?" he seethed dryly.

Aidan shut his eyes and answered his old buddy, still entertained by this little fiasco. "Two weeks ago. I got to chill on the beach for a while … you know the drill. _You've_ been in the pen."

"Yeah, for thirty days. Not eighteen months like you, you little _shit,_" the scarred teen released the boy with the pierced lip from his grip and took a step back. He adjusted the way his leather jacket hung on his shoulders and returned his golden gaze to Aidan, who was adjusting his stripy, zip-up sweatshirt quite casually. "Murder. That was the charge, was it not?" he stifled the need to attack the boy in black.

Aidan laughed, once. "Accessory to Suicide, I believe it was," he tucked his hands into the pockets of his baggy, dark gray camouflage cargo pants. "But let's not talk about me - let's talk about you. You have your _own_ twisted little quirks yourself, am I right?" he poked his tongue out to check his off-centre silver lip ring was still in place.

Zuko scoffed a humorless laugh and stood straight. "Don't you _dare_ compare yourself to me, Riker."

With narrowed, steely, gray-green eyes, Aidan scrutinized Zuko's plain appearance. "Of course, Mr. Scorsese, I do apologize," he mocked in a fake upper-class tone. "I had forgotten how much better than me you were. How you beat the shit out of the medicine man … I must have imagined that. And threatening people? I must have heard wrong, because a great Scorsese boy like yourself - well, that would just be silly!" Aidan exclaimed in fake awe, some coldness seeping into his voice.

Zuko stuck his own hands into the pockets of the leather jacket on his back. "Fuck you, Aidan," he turned his back to his ex-best-friend and looked out the window to the sun-drenched grass outside, deep in thought. He wondered why this shit always happened to _him._

"Buy me dinner first and we'll talk," Aidan teased pointlessly.

Zuko rolled his eyes and shook his head; barely paying attention as the bell went off and the doors of the classrooms burst open, swarms of children piling out. "I have to go to English," he peered at Aidan through narrowed eyes. He couldn't imagine sharing English with Aidan - it was bad enough as it was, with Lydia and Donovan and the awkwardness between him and Katara, but Aidan brought a whole new aspect to the banes of existence. Lydia would sneak behind your back to fuck you over, but Aidan would spit directly in your face if you pissed him off enough.

"Great! I love English. I use it on a daily basis," Aidan rubbed his hands together enthusiastically.

With a disgruntled breath, Zuko pointed at the boy in front of him, a dark look on his face. "You stir up shit for me, Aidan, and I swear to god, you'll wish you were prison again," he threatened seriously, his voice barely above a whisper, so that no other students could hear him for lack of attention. "Is that clear?" he added calmly.

Aidan smirked with faux amicability. "Crystal," he held up his hands innocently.

* * *

><p>Zuko sank down in his seat beside Katara with a grunt of annoyance - Donovan had seated Aidan right behind him, beside Lydia. Zuko could tell Katara noticed his annoyance and he looked to her, trying to ignore the amused gaze of his old acquaintance on his back. Katara's blue eyes showed concern when he met them with his golden ones. "I'm fine," he mouthed, lifting one hand to tell her to leave the subject alone.<p>

She pulled her mouth one way, unwilling to let the subject alone, but she eventually dropped the expression and turned her gaze back to the front of the class. Zuko could tell she was wondering why he was so tense right now, but he really didn't have the patience to explain everything. Like how he had met Aidan in the mental facility three years ago, after his suicide attempt. And that little boy called Noah, who'd been so close to going home.

Given the choice, he never would have discussed Aidan. Ever.

However, as soon as he got out of this lesson, he planned to find a way to talk to Katara privately, and tell her not to go near Aidan. He was bad news and if anything happened to her … if anything happened to her … Zuko didn't know what he'd say after that, but he knew danger was lurking for anyone who got too close to Aidan Riker, and it was best Katara did too. He breathed a sigh in his own concentration, lifting a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, before his fingers found one of the earphones hanging from the clip on his jacket and he brought it up alongside his head and stuck it into his ear.

Ms. Donovan, who was writing on the chalkboard - that god-damned chalkboard every student in the room loathed so much - stepped back and admired her own cursive handwriting, before turning to the class, as they all stared at what she had written. _'Romance,' _was scrawled in neat writing that would've been much more visible if not for the now-quality chalk she used to save money.

"Romance, class," she spoke aloud, as if she doubted the class could read, "is what we'll be working on for the next few weeks. Can any of you name a romantic movie?" she asked the class, smacking the chalk piece onto her desk and picking up a ruler to smack into her palm. She would've preferred if the class had named books, but she doubted they read much.

"Titanic?"

"West Side Story?"

"Pretty In Pink?"

"Pride and Prejudice?"

"Gone With The Wind?"

"The Notebook!"

"Dirty Dancing!"

"Notting Hill!"

"Grease!"

"Pretty Woman!"

"Ghost!"

Donovan smacked the ruler into her palm to cut them all off. "Yes, yes, good. Those are all good examples. Now, what is it in those movies that makes the romance so gripping?" she made a claw-like motion with her hands to emphasize her last word. "There are three things that all classic romances have, and those three things are _tension_, _angst,_ and _chemistry_. Now, what does that mean, class? Tension, for starters; what is romantic tension?"

Zuko and Katara tried their best not to look at eachother as a boy a few rows back, on the left side of the class, answered Ms. Donovan's question with his hand raised in the air. "Is it when the two main characters of a romance are kept apart?" the boy - Hugh, Zuko thought his name was - asked timidly.

Donovan's eyes narrowed for a moment. "Kept apart by what?" she asked quite dryly.

Hugh lifted a hand to the nape of his neck and rubbed there awkwardly. "Uh, well, in 'Titanic', Jack and Rose are kept apart by the fact that she's engaged, and so on…" he trailed off in an indistinct murmur.

Donovan allowed this with a nod. "I suppose that counts. As a result of that engagement, Jack and Rose are unable to be together despite their love, and tension ensues as a result. Very good, Lou."

"Uh, it's Hugh-,"

"Now then!" Donovan clapped her hands together and rubbed her palms against one another. "Angst! You all know what Angst is, so tell me how angst could be created in - say - a romance story you were writing?" her beady little eyes scanned the classroom for a bite on her bait.

A girl with short, green-dyed hair in a pixie style stuck her hand up quite gallantly, her eyes shut calmly. "You could throw one of the characters in front of a bus right after they have a fight with their love interest," she suggested smugly, black-painted lips pursed in her smarmy expression.

"Yes, that's one way of doing it. Any other suggestions?"

A skinny boy with tattoos on his forearms, prominent veins and a few strange ticks answered next. "One of the c-characters could - uh - get blackmailed into having sex with someone else, and then that person's love interest could like … find out …" the boy got distracted and his eyes fell outside the classroom, on the groundskeeper crossing the grass to some teenagers cutting class.

Ms. Donovan smacked her ruler down on the desk, forcing the thin, bony, slight boy to pay attention again. "There will be no talk of sex in this classroom, young man. If I haven't made that rule public in the past, I should very much like to do so now!" she snapped seriously, putting her hands on her desk, leaning forward and giving the class an uncensored view of her saggy cleavage over her low-cut top, causing them to cringe and bite back vomit.

"S-sorry miss…" the boy apologized meekly. Whether it was the conflict or her saggy breasts that sickened him, nobody would ever know.

But this apology was no match for the rant she then went on. "Why, back when I was in school, sex was _unheard of _within the walls of the academic industry!" she scoffed then, and continued, "And intimacy at such an age - absolutely, astoundingly _disgusting_! Where are the parents? Good god-,"

After that, the woman's voice was drowned out by the intercom. The friendly voice of the sweet receptionist at the desk filled the class.

"_**The Drama Committee would like to announce its upcoming performance of 'Don Giovanni' to be cancelled due to a change in project. Instead, The Joint Junior-Senior Drama committee has taken on the task of performing Stephen King's 'Needful Things', as an extra special treat for Mr. O'Leary's healthy return next Friday. Oh, and on a different note, could Prudence Donovan please report to the headmaster's office?"**_

Donovan stiffened and silenced herself, eyes wide and staring off into oblivion for a moment. There was a deafening silence, with each and every student stone-still in their seat - except of course Lydia, and Aidan, because they had no clue who Mr. O'Leary was and why he was so important - as they watched Prudence (Prudence!), turn bright red. Her lips thinned to a line out of a comic strip and her brows sank so far down they might've considered falling off her face and wandering away.

"Reading books out! I want complete silence until I return!" she dropped that ruler of hers to her desk and stormed out of the room.

There was silence.

For about four seconds after the door shut.

Then there was laughing and cheering and possibly even some tears. Katara and Zuko finally managed to look at one another with huge, shit-eating grins on their faces, leaning back in their chairs and crossing their arms, imagining having their old teacher back. No more Ms. Crappy-Ass Donovan - O'Leary, the guy who actually _taught _them stuff in a manner they could actually _relate to _was back! They just had to make it to next Friday.

Katara wondered how the drama committee was going to get a whole play underhand in less than two weeks. Then she remembered seeing Yue - who was big into the Drama club - carrying a huge bag full of Stephen King books from the drama room back to the library, about five weeks ago. She shook her head at the realization that 'Don Giovanni' had been a front for what they'd been planning, and they must have known O'Leary had been returning for a while. That was probably the best-kept secret in the history of the school.

Gossip kind of found its way around in this place. Granted, some things didn't become gossip if you handled them just right; much to Sokka and Yue's surprise, Suki had said nothing to anyone as to Sokka's night with Yue, but word had gotten around that they weren't together anymore. When people asked why, she just told them to mind their business. But back on the subject of gossip, there were a few rules to the gossip, so nobody got in trouble for sex.

Making out was code for having sex, kissing was code for sexual acts that weren't exclusively intercourse, cuddling was code for making out, holding hands was code for flirting. Also, there were some phrases you could use, like 'spent the night together', because that didn't exactly say anything about sex. It was implied, but not exclusively labeled. Plus, the code was kind of dated, all the way back to the nineties. Some of the kids' _parents_ had used that code once. Nowadays, the teachers really didn't pay much attention, so you could ask whether someone had gotten laid recently. There were just a few teachers you had to keep an eye on.

"Hey, buddy - who the fuck is O'Leary?" Aidan leant forward in his seat to ask Zuko.

Zuko turned his head only slightly. "It doesn't matter. You won't be in this class anyway," he answered dryly.

"Far as you know - I might be a literary genius," Aidan insisted with a grin. "I'm so smart I write porn, in all the details," his brows went up in a little suggestive dance. "Come on, man, enlighten me; for old times sake," he poked his tongue out and toyed with his lip piercing.

Katara opened her mouth to ask how Zuko knew the dark-looking boy behind him, but her friend shot a look her way that told her not to say anything, and that he would explain as soon as they got out of the class. Zuko sighed an answer for Aidan. "Mr. O'Leary used to teach this class. Donovan took over when he had to quit the job."

Aidan reached out and clapped Zuko on the shoulder amicably - it made Zuko want to puke. "Thanks."

Zuko expected Lydia to be the one to ask how they knew eachother, but she wasn't. He would've thanked her for this if it hadn't meant having to get in a conversation with her. He focused on the clock above that stupid chalkboard and willed the minute hand to get a move on. He couldn't wait to get out of here.

* * *

><p>Zuko caught Katara by the wrist and pulled her down the hall, in the opposite direction from the one Aidan was going. He got her around the corner before Aidan got the chance to look around for them. Katara was caught off-guard by a wonder of why Zuko wanted her alone, and that lead her mind astray for a moment, as he pulled her around another corner and down into that empty stairwell everyone avoided.<p>

"Zuko, what-,"

"Shh!" Zuko reprimanded her, leaning out the door into the hall just to check again if there was anyone around.

Katara had to force down the girly giggle that threatened to escape. She stayed silent. She could just imagine him kissing her now, in the eerie desolation of that empty fabled stairwell G, where that kid had gotten stabbed in the neck with a scissors. Somehow, that didn't take away from the appeal of the idea. "What's going on?" she whispered, not betraying her fantasy.

Zuko turned back and ushered her down to the little flat platform of the stairwell. He lifted his hands until they took her upper arms at her sides, sending shivers down her spine. "I need you to promise me something," he whispered carefully, his eyes cast downward to meet sparkling blue orbs of confusion. "It's important."

Katara searched his eyes, her eyebrows coming together and her lips parting. "What is it?"

"Stay away from Aidan," he told her immediately, almost breaking his whisper. "Don't _talk _to him, don't _look _at him, don't even acknowledge his presence if he enters the room." Then he added, in a tiny voice, his brows turning upward to emphasize his concern; _"Please."_

Katara's tongue ran along her lower lip, and she hesitated for a moment, tearing her eyes from his and glancing away, before looking back up to him, trying not to melt at his touch. "I promise," she whispered, her voice wavering slightly. What was so terrible about this boy who knew him from what she assumed he might call 'the good old days'? She tried to decipher this, but she couldn't.

Zuko pursed his lips together thoughtfully. How could he explain? How could he tell her all about how a boy of thirteen had persuaded another to kill himself? How could he burden her with images of the sick smile Aidan wore? He realized he would have to, for her safety's sake. _'No more secrets'. _He replied, his whisper grave and serious; "I met him after I tried to kill myself. In the psych ward," he swallowed the dry feeling in his throat.

Katara's eyes widened for a moment, and she didn't need to speak to get him to continue.

"He was my friend. I was stuck in my room for the first few weeks, and he came to welcome me to the ward. Then, when I was allowed to walk around, we would go visit the other people on the floor, because they were stuck there. We were best friends, for a long time," Zuko sighed out a breath of hesitation and then he continued. "There was a little boy … _Noah_," he paused, shut his eyes and took a long blink.

"Noah?" Katara's brows knit together in confusion.

"He was eleven or twelve, and he'd been there for longer than both of us; maybe a whole year. He told us his psychiatrist said he was nearly ready to go home," Zuko felt a lump in his throat rising to choke him, and when he tried to swallow it away, it wouldn't leave. He forced his voice over it and continued. "He was excited, to go home to his mother. He was a nice kid … he used to get books from the library delivered for him - his grandfather would send him whatever he asked for. Noah had one of the Dark Tower books - 'The Gunslinger'. He gave it to me to read. I read the series in the psych ward."

"Did Noah go home?" she asked, before her mind had even processed the question. Obviously this whole memory was painful for Zuko - she should've stopped herself.

"No," Zuko snapped dryly.

Katara's eyebrows went up at the sudden reply.

Zuko shook his head and shut his eyes. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be snapping at you," he sighed through his nose because his lips were drawn together in a deep-set line. "Noah should've gone home," he murmured in a thick voice, plagued by that lump in his throat. Suddenly, Katara's hand was on his chest.

"We don't have to talk about this, Zuko. Not if you don't want to."

"You need to know. Otherwise you won't understand why it's so important that you stay away from Aidan," he nodded adamantly, and forced himself to continue. "One morning, the orderly found Noah dead in his room, with a chest needle stuck into him. Noah couldn't have gotten it because he was always locked in his room," at this, Katara stiffened in his hands, but he kept on anyway. "The man in the room opposite Noah's said he'd seen Aidan going into Noah's room after hours. The security cameras caught it too. When the police questioned Aidan, he admitted to giving Noah a needle of adrenaline … and _watching_ Noah _kill_ himself. He just laughed … the whole time."

Katara's face screamed for silence at this point, and she felt for the little boy Zuko spoke of. _'Why are you telling me all this?' _her eyes asked silently.

"Noah never went home, even though he was so ready to. Aidan manipulated Noah into committing suicide, for his own _twisted, sick amusement,_" Zuko ground his teeth and opened his eyes to watch Katara, pushing away his pain to calm himself. "I later realized that when Aidan slept late in the day, it was because he'd spent the night sitting with Noah, toying with his head. I don't think Aidan started fucking with him until he found out Noah was going home; it took two weeks for Noah to finally cave in. I still don't know why he did it … but I know he's not safe," he reasoned with himself, out loud for Katara's benefit.

"Zuko …"

"Stay away from him," he repeated solemnly, and then he squeezed her arms desperately. "If anything happened to you …" he breathed a heavy sigh, unwilling to let himself continue, partially because he hadn't thought of the words after that, partially because it would hurt to begin thinking of it now, "Fuck, Katara, if anything happened to you …"

Katara suddenly threw her arms around him and buried her face against his neck. She squeezed him tightly in her grip, her own jacket making a whiny noise against the leather of his. He smelled of tobacco and sandalwood, and something else, something spicy. He gave a slight grunt at the impact with which she hugged him, but then he sighed and put his arms around her in return. He turned his head and put his cheek against her temple, shutting his eyes tightly and holding her close.

* * *

><p>"What exactly are you eating?" Aang cleared his throat and lifted a hand, his thumb and forefinger in a pincer shape, looking at the misty clear plastic bag Toph was eating out of.<p>

"Lucky Charms. Stole them from Katara's house," Toph answered, popping a little blue rainbow into her mouth.

"Ooh," Aang murmured, plucking at the bag and coming away with a little four-leafed clover. "I love Lucky Charms."

Toph grinned, and then gasped. "Hey! Go get me an empty bowl, some spoons and one of those little milk cartons!"

"Got it!" Aang jumped out of his seat, cereal threatening to spill from his mouth. _'Lucky Charms for lunch!' _a childish voice cheered in his head happily. He took off for the lunch line, patting his pocket to be sure his lunch money was still there. With a jingle, it made its presence apparent and his grin widened. Repetitions of 'yum-yum-yum' chorused between his ears.

"Hey, where'd you get those?" Zuko asked, reaching for the baggie in Toph's hands as he sat down, Katara not far behind him.

Toph snatched it back and rolled it up. "Stole them from Katara's house a few days ago. And you can't have any."

"Why not?"

"Because Aang's gone to get the remaining ingredients for me to make a bowlful," she explained sagely, her eyes shut and her voice nonchalant.

Katara sat down beside Zuko, dropped her bag on the floor and put her elbows on the table. "So, who else heard that Sokka and Suki broke up?" she asked thoughtfully, her eyes fixed on the center of the table, where Aang's latest toy sat - a purple bouncy ball with rubber tentacles that lit up in rainbow colors when you hit it against something solid. Seriously - where do those things come from? What freaking company makes shit like that? Do they serve some profound purpose that we're just not smart enough to understand?

Toph punched Katara in the arm. "It's a sad day when you're hearing about your brother's breakup from gossip, Sugarqueen," she shook her head. "But yes. Jet told me about it. Nobody knows why or how they broke up, though. I thought _you_ might," the blind bandit looked off after Aang to see how her cereal was coming along.

Katara said nothing, and took a long blink that unsettled both Toph and Zuko.

Zuko decided to answer for Katara. "Sokka isn't talking to either of us."

"Me or Aang either," Toph replied, a cold undertone to her usually chipper voice. "It's like he thinks we've taken sides against him, or something."

Zuko ran his tongue over the healing cut where Sokka had punched him. "Something like that," he murmured pensively, before glancing aside and giving a nervous chuckle. "B-but seriously," he began, wondering why he'd stuttered. "He's more on edge than ever - he wouldn't even make eye contact with me when I saw him this morning in the parking lot. He looked like he thought I was going to slash his tires."

"Wouldn't be the first time you did that, by the way, Sparky."

Zuko stuck his tongue out at this comment. "Oh, come on, you guys would've done the same thing. That guy was asking for it."

"Nonetheless; something needs to be done about Sokka," Toph poked the tip of her finger down on the table authoritatively as if she were gesturing to war plans. "I think we should kick his ass," she formed a fist in one hand and them smacked it into her palm, a grin finding its way onto her face.

Katara wondered how that could possibly fix anything, but she didn't voice this thought. Instead, she lifted a hand and scratched her head pensively, before putting two fingertips to her temple and dragging the skin in a soothing massage. "That can't possibly be your solution, Toph. He's our friend. He's my brother. We can't just beat the shit out of him if he's having a rough time."

"No milk left. Who's having a rough time?" Aang asked upon his return. He sat down and gave Toph a kiss on the cheek as if in the last three minutes away from her, he'd had time to miss her.

"Sokka. We're trying to figure out how to make him sane again," Toph replied calmly, her brows down and her face screwed up in a frown most people didn't wear until they hit their thirties.

"That sounds like a long and boring conversation after which nothing is resolved and we've wasted our entire lunch time," Aang snorted, rather abruptly and sharply. "I thought we could go sit in on the dress rehearsal for 'Needful Things'," he suggested, his dark expression lifting and a cheerful smile finding its way back to his face.

Zuko rolled his eyes. "I respect that they're doing it for O'Leary, but the movie was bad already. The play is going to suck worse than when they _butchered_ 'Love Amongst The Dragons'," he complained, displeased. His golden eyes narrowed and his lips thinned against one another.

"I never saw the movie," Katara commented absentmindedly.

"Then don't. It'll ruin the book for you."

Aang hung his head and groaned in annoyance. "Jeez, Zuko - what else is there to do?" he smacked his hand down on the table forcefully, bored to the point of frustration. "If I sit around for another five minutes I'll have to start doing downers to keep myself from having a hyperactive episode …"

After thinking to himself that it wasn't just him that was agitated today, Zuko scowled and patted the pocket of his jacket to check if his cigarettes were there. He suddenly felt a great need to have one, and he gave a minimal grunt of irritation. "Alright, fine. We'll go outside. I need a smoke anyway," he decided, getting up from his seat and got his feet up under him. The others got up too, and they headed for the small side door that led out into a

"Hang on. I'll be right back," Suki told them, before heading back to the cafeteria.

* * *

><p>Sokka poked a fork into his lunch, somehow finding himself not hungry. It was lasagna - his favorite meal at the school - and yet, he couldn't eat. He kind of wanted to hang with Katara, Aang and Toph right now, but Katara was probably buddied up with Suki, and of course, Zuko was with them. Sokka scowled at his food; how the hell could his sister forgive Zuko so easily? She could've been raped! Killed! Just thinking about it made Sokka want to punch that stupid asshole one more time.<p>

Much to his surprise, someone suddenly sat down opposite him and put their elbows on the table, their hands dangling over their lap. He looked up and saw it was Suki, wearing a loose, grass-green, plaid flannel shirt with a waist belt that sucked her into an hourglass figure, her hair tied into a low, short ponytail at the base of her skull. She also wore a plain expression that took him a moment to try to decipher. "We need to talk. It's pitiful, you sitting alone," she pushed her brows up sagely.

Sokka didn't reply, but instead dropped his blue eyes back to his food.

"We're going to have a schedule. You get to hang out with Katara, Aang and Toph on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, and I get Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. That seem fair to you?" she suggested with a long blink, no hostility in her voice at all, for some reason.

Sokka gave a hilariously confused frown and looked up from his food. "What?" he then scoffed a humorless laugh, "What is this, a divorce settlement?" he asked, this time his laugh containing some amusement. He poked his food again and managed to shove some lasagna into his mouth despite his lack of appetite.

Suki laughed too. "Yeah, I guess it is. Anyway, things are weird between us, so I figure it's a good idea, at least until we're able to be civil to eachother."

"Well, this is pretty civil," Sokka pointed out, managing a more amicable tone that he'd thought himself capable of right now.

Suki smiled. "True …" she agreed, before lifting her hand onto the table and making a gesture that looked like she was offering something to him. "But still. It's not up to me to make things awkward between you and them - they were your friends first. If you want, I can even take Zuko off your hands. Katara told me there was some angst going on between you three," she offered thoughtfully.

Sokka felt his blood want to stop and run the other way around his body as he realized what Suki was trying to do. She was trying to be the bigger person, so he could look like a total douchebag, and then feel bad and guilty, and then beg her and all that shit to come back to him! He leapt to his feet and pointed at Suki apprehensively. "I see what you're trying to do! Well it's not going work, because I'm too smart for it!"

Suki watched him intently, hiding her amusement.

"And I'll take your deal, because they _were_ my friends first, but because _**I'm **_the bigger person, you can have Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, because it's better than the other three days of the week, and there's two days in a row, and I'm being _nice_! Good day to you, Suki!" he bowed his head stubbornly, before turning and storming out the way he'd seen the others go.

Suki smirked, her eyes burning into his back as he walked away. Finally shaking her head and laughing under her breath, she murmured to herself.

"Dumbass."

* * *

><p>When he saw Sokka coming from one direction, and Aidan coming from the other, Zuko decided he needed to split. He also decided he didn't want Aidan to meet any of his friends, since he was a sick, twisted fuck, and that he needed to keep him away from them. He gave Katara a meaningful look and gestured with his head to where Aidan was coming up, black sneakers hitting the tarmac with deliberate steps.<p>

Katara only glanced, but it was enough to tell who was coming, by the messy, black-dyed hair, the thick eyeliner and the lip piercing, and the open, stripy zip-up sweatshirt. Before she could ay anything to Zuko, he was walking away from them and going to meet Aidan. He walked right past Aidan, and Katara figured this was because Zuko knew Aidan, and Aidan stopped and walked after the scarred teen when he did this, away from them.

"Hey, where's Zuko going?" Aang wondered quietly.

Katara shook her head. "Don't ask."

"SNOOZLES!" Toph suddenly yelled, eyes moving to the direction from which Sokka was walking.

The other two snapped their gazes to Sokka, who was walking up to where they stood in the small alley between two of the school buildings, a blob of blue in a simple, navy blue tank top and some dark grey cargo pants, his favorite camouflage sneakers on his feet. At Toph's battle cry, he managed a smile, but before he could register what was happening, Toph had run up to him and flung her arm into his, her fist hitting him so hard she nearly knocked him over.

Once he wasn't on the verge of falling over, his smile grew wider; if her punches were displays of affection, she'd just given him a huge hug for missing him. "Hi, Toph," he squeaked, reaching over his torso to clutch the already bruising place where she'd punched him. "You're getting stronger," he complimented warmly.

"Don't blow smoke up my ass, Fancy Pants," Toph replied coolly, still wearing a grin. "Did your ex-wife send you?"

Sokka stuck his tongue out comically. _"No, _she did _not, _I decided to hang out with you guys by _myself. _I don't need _her _to tell me what I can and can't do," he insisted, before sticking his hands in his pockets and walking with Toph toward where Aang and Katara were standing. "Hey, baby sister," he greeted calmly.

Katara gave him a dubious look. "Are we friends again?"

"Were we not?"

"Yeah, when you tried to murder Zuko at the courthouse …"

"Pssh!" Sokka waved it away. "I wasn't trying to kill him. I was trying to maim him. Big difference. Anyway, my beef is with Zuko, not you," he pointed out neutrally, "I don't get why you two are still friends, but just because you are doesn't mean I have to be friends with him, or enemies with you."

Katara found herself smiling. "That's … really mature of you, Sokka."

"It is, isn't it?" he smirked happily. "I'm a big person."

Aang suddenly groaned, raising a hand and facepalming himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose, shut his eyes tightly and grimaced; forming creases in his face so deep they were solid black lines. He had figured out what was going on - the battle for the 'bigger person' title, between Sokka and Suki. He knew this, because he'd had to leave a family he'd been with for six months, because they were divorcing, and being so sickly-sweet to one another it was fucking vomit inducing.

Sokka narrowed his eyes at Aang. "What?"

Aang shook his head and regained his composure. "Huh? Oh, nothing. I just realized I forgot my textbook in Biology," he lied unassumingly. "Good to have you back, Sokka."

"You owe me, Snoozles," Toph suddenly cut in, strolling like a cat behind him.

"I do?" Sokka looked over his shoulder at her.

"You missed my birthday party," she reminded him, her tone scolding. "I figure that's … what? Three hours of piggybacking?" she wondered aloud.

Sokka groaned and bent his knees, lowering his back for her to jump onto it. "Hop on," he rolled his eyes in defeat.

Toph grinned and jumped onto his back. Once he was standing straight and she was looking around from her new vantage point, she patted him on the top of the head. "Good pony. Does pony want a sugar cube?" she asked, her grin falling into a smirk, her skinny jeans tighter against her skin thanks to her new position. She somehow pulled the pack of lucky charms from her pocket and dangled them in front of his face.

"Nah, I'm fine."

"Come on, Snoozles. You love Lucky Charms."

Sokka laughed and opened his mouth, for Toph to pour a small amount of lucky charms into it. She then rolled up the baggie and got it back into her pocket, before locking her arms around his shoulders and looking around in boredom. She remembered the piggyback races they'd had, her and Sokka versus Zuko and Katara. The best thing had been that they won and lost equally, so there was always fun in the game. When one person always won, there was no fun in it anymore. Aang and Katara would make a crappy piggyback-race team.

"So, where _is_ Suki?" Aang hesitated a moment before he said it, but he got it out without too much awkwardness.

Sokka shrugged as best he could with Toph on his back. "We _may _have come to an _arrangement _in which I get you guys on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and she gets you on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Because I'm the bigger person so I gave her more days," he added at the end, taking a long, sagely blink.

Toph cackled from Sokka's back - her laughter echoed in his ear. "_Dude! _You two are divorcing!"

Sokka laughed, despite himself. "Yeah … we kind of are. That makes you guys our kids."

"Mush, daddy! MUSH!" Toph yelled out, before pointing onwards and then turning her voice to Aang and Katara. "Come on, you two! MUSH!"

Laughing, Sokka moved onwards, and Aang and Katara followed.

* * *

><p>Later on, after his final class, Zuko walked to the parking lot, his hands tucked in his pockets, with Aidan following him. He was able to ignore Aidan for a short amount of time before they got out into the lot, but once the afternoon sun was above them, on a diagonal angle as it began to think of sunset, Aidan's casual chatter became too much for his irritated head to bear.<p>

"So, I figure, to celebrate my rehabilitation, I should get totally _fucked _up. But, it's not a celebration to drink alone. What do you say, Zuko?" he elbowed the Scorsese boy playfully and then stuck his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt. "There's a nice strip joint in the city, and if you pay this redhead enough, she'll stick her hand down your pants and play Donkey-Kong with your Joy-Stick."

Zuko clenched his teeth - each moment with Aidan today had been like scraping his forehead on a cheese grater. "You're fucking disgusting," he looked over his shoulder with eyes so narrow they were little more than thin strips of gold color.

"They don't teach you manners in Juvenile Hall," Aidan suddenly stopped walking and watched Zuko with his feet fixed on the tarmac.

Zuko scoffed. "I didn't think they did. Doubt there's a please-and-thank-you rule to the butt-rape in the shower fiasco…" he managed some humor in the midst of his own irritation.

Aidan watched Zuko with that amused smile on his face again. "No, I guess not. I was able to take care of myself, at least. Can't say the same for some of the other boys," he mused thoughtfully, looking off toward the huge grass lawn of the school. He admired the grass - he hadn't seen much of it while stuck in juvenile hall. He murmured something that Zuko didn't catch.

Zuko cringed at the idea of Aidan listening by while some kid got ass-raped by some bigger kid. Eugh. He remembered Juvie well - thirty days of listening to kids crying in their beds and that shit. Only once had his scar been good for him, and that had been juvenile hall. Nobody wanted to fuck a guy whose face looked like it had already _been_ raped, as Sokka had put it when he picked him up on his release. "Do you regret it?" Zuko asked, before he'd even thought about it, stopping in his tracks and turning to face Aidan.

Aidan continued to smile at him. "Regret what?"

"Noah."

Aidan ran his tongue across his lower lip and then smirked. "I once got a devout Christian old woman to worship Satan. I persuaded a teenaged mother to abandon her baby in the woods in the middle of winter. I got a kid to pull one of his dad's teeth in his sleep with a pliers for telling him there was no tooth fairy," his face was unchanging, constant, and sickening.

Zuko felt more and more like vomiting with each word out of his ex-best-friend's mouth.

Aidan lifted one hand from his pocket and inspected his short nails. "Hell, I even screwed the brains out of a thirteen year old girl just by telling her I was going to marry her, fucking bimbo … my point is, man … my father once told me something before his _untimely_ death … _'Make your mark on this world.' _I was given this gift, this _power_ of manipulation - and when I'm through, this world will have one big ugly scar on its face, just like you," he smirked, dark eyes glinting in the sunlight with some dark and disgusting intent lodged in them.

Zuko's right eye widened, and to a lesser degree, his left, and he stared at Aidan as if her were watching a bear tear an infant to shreds.

"It's easy for you to stare at me like I'm a monster, but were born with _everything, _and I was born with _nothing," _his smile never faltered. "This world has dealt me nothing but pain and suffering and agony, and now?" he gave a sickening, maddening cackle. It was lucky the buses were gone and the walkers were a ways away by now, because his laugh was loud and crazy, and reminded Zuko of the noose in the forest that Azula had once done pledges in. What Aidan said next, grinning like the Joker, made Zuko's skin crawl. "Now it's _**MY TURN!**_"

* * *

><p><strong>AN: There's our new antagonist, folks. Comments are much appreciated. What do you guys think of the new Zuko-centric theme? I can't say much, because I have to go to bed. There is one thing I've wanted to say since I started writing this chapter, though: I AM NOT SHIPPING MAKORRA! (Yet.) I'll tell you why; Dante Basco is voicing a Zuko-linked character in LoK, and I'm leaving my options open! There's gotta be a new Fire Nation heir, and when that guy swings around, I'll be there with my plain white shipping banner, ready to scrawl on the new ship's name! If Mako turns out to be cool enough, I might ship it. Maybe. Korra I already know will be Epic.**

**Also, one more reason I'm not shipping Makorra, is because it might be canon, and because Kataangers are shipping it. UGH! Kataangers and Zutarians working TOGETHER? No! So I'm not shipping it, mainly to piss off the Kataangers. ^_^**

**Anyway. I can't decide whether or not to get Katara that gorgeous chestnut paint horse Song's father is selling. It would be a great plot point. Also, just to clear it up, Yue and Sokka are not together. It was just a one-night stand. Love you guys!**

**REVIEWs for the RE-VIEWS! (Lovely Sokka scene here ^_^)**

* * *

><p>A blur of creamy gold came sliding across the hallway with another high-pitched yap, trying to stop itself before it crashed into Katara's shins. Katara looked down and saw huge brown eyes staring up at her. "Aww!" she cooed out, kneeling down and smoothing soft fingertips over the puppy's fur.<p>

Her brother came sliding just the same down the hall, from the sunroom, obviously chasing the puppy, with his father running behind him. "Oh, hey, dad, she uh …"

Katara looked up to see her father smiling awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck, and her brother holding an equally tiny kitten in one arm. "Katara, I took it upon myself to try to make amends by … well, I got you a puppy, to be frank." He shrugged nervously.

Katara just smiled up at her dad. "Is it a girl or a boy?" she asked thoughtfully.

"It's a boy. And _this _is Foo-Foo-Cuddly-Poops." Sokka gestured with his free hand to the kitten in his arms. "Don't care that _I _have a new pet or anything. Just be totally self-absorbed …" he snapped sardonically. "Not like I care."


	11. The Dark Side Of The Moon

Zuko dismounted his bike in the white-lined parking rectangle beside the chalky gray sidewalk of the nicer part of the city. He knew Katara, Suki and Azula had few things in common, but one of them was the Dancing Dragon Day Spa. Right now, he'd tried both Azula's and Katara's cell phones to get a hold of them, but had been unable to, and that meant they were both here. He wondered if they'd conspired together to head to the spa after school, or if they'd just run into one another and decided to use the two-for-one deal to their advantage.

Standing outside the spa, he gave a scowl that looked like he was hiding a lemon slice in his mouth. The front of the spa was composed of three terrace buildings he assumed had once been houses, the cheap kind you got if you were on the right kind of welfare, painted an earthy cream color, and the arch over the door, and the woodwork around the windows were accented in a dark forest green. In the window, red banners with either Chinese or Japanese characters on them - he guessed Japanese because they were a lot simpler than he thought Chinese ones were.

He recognized one of the vertically positioned, golden characters on the identical banners. _'Hi' -_ Fire. His uncle had that on a few of his stuff, so that when Zuko had asked what it meant, he'd been able to answer quite knowledgably. Zuko was sure his uncle spoke fluent Japanese - otherwise how would he have survived his years in Japan? Then, upon further inspection, he recognized the character just above 'Fire'. _'Mizu', _he believed it was pronounced, though he'd never tried either word on his tongue for fear they would sound dumb without a whole sentence. He was sure that one meant 'water', and so that led him to believe the other two were 'Earth' and 'Air'.

Zuko walked up the steps on the front wall of the spa. He hadn't been inside before, but he figured it smelled like his uncle's house inside, and probably had a lot more than just banners accenting the place. He pushed open the green-painted door with ingrained Japanese lettering, and saw a lightwood decorated reception area open before him. Stepping in, he saw a pine desk with a girl about his age sitting behind it, ash blonde hair pushed behind her ears and thin black glasses sitting on her nose. She looked like she could help him get a hold of his sister, and his sort-of-almost-girlfriend.

"Excuse me," he began politely, approaching the desk. "I'm looking for my sister, and her friend. The name on the appointment will either be Scorsese or Marina …"

The blonde girl with the glasses looked up at him for a moment. "You'll have to wait out here for them, then," she pointed over the desk to some black leather sofas by the window with the red banners in it. She then looked back to her computer and continued with her accounting work.

Zuko was taken aback for a moment before he raised a hand and rubbed the back of his neck. "It's kind of important. I only need to talk to them for a second," he reasoned hopefully. He found himself wondering if the money in his pocket might do anything to help her make her decision as to whether she helped him find Azula and Katara.

The blonde girl rolled her eyes and raised a hand to be sure her short hair was still behind her ear. "Nobody gets in the massage room without an appointment - those are the rules, and if I break 'em, I get sacked, okay? I don't make the rules, I just follow them - I'm not trying to hassle you, and I'm sure it _is _important that you see them, but I can't help you with that," she explained rather curtly, taking long and exasperated blinks as she spoke.

Zuko breathed in long and heard and then exhaled his heavy breath. It looked like he would have to wait for them for a moment, but then the cogs of his mind got to work and a smirk found its way onto his face. "Alright, I'd like to get a massage, then. How much is it?" he stuffed his calloused hand into his pocket and grabbed the money clip in it. Besides, how bad could it be to get pampered for once?

The blonde girl looked back up and then smiled for a moment, before laughing at him. "First time here?" she chuckled.

Zuko frowned, confused.

"You don't just buy a massage here. We do packages. There's the three-hour package, and the four-hour package. The three-hour package includes a massage, foot-rub, acupuncture, mud bath, facial, manicure, pedicure and an hour in the steam room. The four-hour package has all that, plus the hot stone therapy, face massage, and has aromatherapy throughout most of the procedure," she explained, leaning back in her chair with a posture that said she needed a massage herself.

Zuko raised his only eyebrow. "Procedure sounds painful," he noted in displeasure. This whole thing was sounding painful, now. Acupuncture? Manicure? Mud bath? It sounded like he'd come out of here smelling like a bowl of flowers and feeling like a sack of bricks.

The girl looked up at him and then grabbed a pen on the desk, beginning to write on her notepad. "I'll book you in for the three-hour package. Your sister and her friend are waiting in the massage room - only got here about twenty minutes ago. I've put you in for the three-for-two package, so that's … one hundred and twenty five bucks."

Zuko nodded and pulled out his money clip, plucking out two hundreds and putting them on the desk for her. She picked them up and grabbed some notes from a tidy pile by her keyboard, giving him back his change. Zuko took the notes and put them into his money clip, before looking to his left to see where the door leading to the massage room was. He saw a room up ahead, but there was also a flight of pine stairs leading upstairs.

"If you ask me, you look like you could use a spa day," the blonde girl commented disinterestedly. "The massage parlor is upstairs. Can't miss it. Gold plated sign on the door," she gestured to the stairs with her pen. "You can take off your clothes in the changing room up there. Got a sign on it too. We have a strict policy of no funny business with naked people around - nobody wants to get sued for sexual harassment, got it?" she then picked up an intercom phone, probably to call upstairs and tell them to expect one more customer.

Zuko had to consciously avoid blushing when she said this. "Yeah," he gave a nervous chuckle, before smiling awkwardly and walking toward the stairs, his hands in his pockets. _'Naked?' _Ugh. He knew he was going to regret this. As he walked up the steep flight of wooden stairs, he mused on the implications of him being naked in a room with Katara also naked, and couldn't help but smirk a little to himself, but despite this lovely little musing, Azula would be there, and as the receptionist had said; no funny business.

When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw on his right a door with 'changing room' on it on a gold plaque. He looked around for a door with a 'girls' sign or a 'boys' sign, but saw none, and was quite dismayed to discover that men and women were expected to share a changing room - even in his crappy old public school they had separate changing rooms. He walked into the changing room and was quite happy it was empty, his mind wondering why the girl at the front desk had pointed out so blatantly that they didn't want any lawsuits around them.

He figured it was because it had happened before.

He saw Katara's and Azula's schoolbags sat on the bench with their clothes sticking out of them, jackets hung on the coat hangers above, and with some curiosity, Zuko saw that Katara's was partially open. He drew nearer, fighting off the blush on his face, and carefully glanced down into the bag from his standing position to see a lacy, satin, red and black bra covered, in part, by the sneakers Katara had been wearing today.

Zuko immediately turned around and gave a brief laugh at his own excitement. It was just a bra, after all. It shouldn't … do whatever it had just done … He shook it off and grabbed the bottom of his tight, dark blue thermal shirt and pulled it off over his head, tossing it to the spot just beside Azula's bag. He quickly disrobed and folded his clothes, putting them in a neat pile by Azula's bag. When he was stood there in nothing but his underwear, he then wondered if they wanted him _all _naked. Then he thought back to the bra and figured they probably did. After taking his undies off and stuffing them down the pants leg of his jeans, Zuko stood naked, looking around for the towel he'd always imagined people wore at spas. He saw a column of soft white towels folded by the door he'd just come through. There were some small, plastic sliding clips there that he supposed you were supposed to use to clip your towel around you.

After grabbing a towel and clipping it around his waist, Zuko nervously peeked out the door. The whole world seemed out to get you when you were butt-naked in a strange place. Carefully, he stepped out and shut the door behind himself, checking again to be sure his towel was secured around his waist, and tiptoeing toward the room marked 'massage parlor'. When he finally reached the door, he gently pushed it open and walked in, his feet finding themselves on panel flooring instead of carpet.

There was a gasp and he turned around, pressing his back to the door in panic, terrified that he may have stepped into the wrong room, hands going out to grab the frame of the now-shut door behind him.

Katara and Azula both stared at him in surprise, lying on their stomachs on massage tables, both clutching their towels to their bare chests, despite the clip being there to hold it up - instinct, Zuko would've guessed if he wasn't coming off a small heart attack. Azula was the first to speak in a low, hushed tone. "What are you doing here?"

Zuko breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed, letting go of the doorframe behind him. "Oh, jeez … you'd have scared the pants off me if I were wearing pants …" he breathed. "I tried your cells but I guess you turned 'em off," he explained, walking towards them. There were five massage tables in the room, and Katara and Azula were on the end, so that when he took one, Katara would be in the middle of him and Azula.

"You still didn't answer the question," Katara noted dryly, eyeing him suspiciously. "Why _are _you here?"

Zuko held his hands up innocently, sitting down on the massage table next to Katara's. "Hey, I said I'd be like, five minutes, but the girl at the desk said nobody gets in without a package. So I'm getting acupuncture and a freaking _manicure … _to talk to you guys," he pointed out quite abruptly.

"What about?" Azula asked, lowering herself back to the massage table under her.

Zuko inhaled, perhaps to begin on a long and rambling explanation as to how he knew Aidan, but Katara cut him off.

"Ah!" she yelped, her voice scolding. "There's no way in hell you're going to ruin my spa date with depressing talk of your homicidal ex-best-friend. We're going to have our massages, and then our facials, then our mud baths, then our manicures, pedicures and foot massages, and then our hour in the steam room, and a good few hours of subsequent relaxation before you come and ruin it!" she lectured, causing him to shrink a size. "Now lie down and shut up!"

Zuko shut his already-open mouth and allowed a smirk onto his face. He _had_ wanted to talk to Katara about Aidan, but he supposed he could go for some relaxation before thinking about anything else today. Also, Katara was cute when she was angry. "Yes, ma'am," he smiled at her, before adjusting himself into lying position on his stomach and finding it rather comfortable.

Katara huffed and admired her own little lecture, before lying down and waiting for the masseuses to arrive. She wondered why they always took so long coming out, and then she figured it was probably less to do with them having stuff to do and more to do with them wanting their customers to already be relaxed in the setting before rubbing oils on them and shit like that. She nearly drooled at the idea of the massage; she hadn't been for once since long before the kidnap. It would be nice to relax.

She could tell Zuko was only getting more and more tense with the situation, not the reverse. She wanted to tell him to calm down, but then she heard a door clicking on the far side of the room; not the door Zuko had just come through, another, toward the end of the room. Katara had only ever seen two of the five masseurs that worked here at any one time, but three of them walked out, each carrying a tan-colored bag on their hip with handy sectioning for each of the little bottles in them. She knew there were three women and two men who worked here, at least in the massage role, but only one of the women and two of the men came this time. She wondered if it could be considered weird for her not to know the names of any of these people who put her in the most relaxed state she could imagine.

There was no talking involved in the sessions, except between customers. Sometimes Azula would tell her masseur to move a little lower, or more to the left, and he or she would comply, and then Azula would make a little noise of bliss when a knot in the muscles was worked away. Azula didn't usually hold much tension in her muscles, for the most part, but today was different, Katara knew by what Azula had told her in the car on the way here; Azula had had Zhao, Ozai's driver, drive them. Apparently, an old ex-member of the sorority she, Mai and Ty Lee ran had taken some other girls - freshmen and sophomores for the most part - down to the Southern forest for the first pledge of her new sorority.

The southern forest where that girl had been killed last summer.

As soon as Mai, whose back balcony had a view of the only road leading to the southern forest, had called Azula and told her what she'd seen, the two had gone straight up there to have words with Stephanie, the ex-member of their sorority. It had resulted in Stephanie trying to hit Azula, and Azula dodging and grabbing a muddy branch to stay balanced, but in the end, Stephanie had stormed off and Mai had driven the pledglings home.

The masseurs each took a customer and took off their tan-colored bags of oils and shortened the straps, before hanging the bags on the corners of the massage tables. Katara didn't actually see this, because she'd put her head down, but she felt masculine, but pampered, hands on her shoulders and she couldn't help but smile expectantly. She was sure she heard Azula make that blissful sound she did when she was having her own way.

Zuko, on the other hand, was a different story.

As soon as he felt a woman's hand on his bare back, he moved to sit up, but she pushed him down wordlessly. She made a 'tsk' noise as she ran her hands over his back, testing the tension, as if it was _his fault _that his muscles were so tense, and his brows went down. Then, the woman pressed her thumbs into some tender spots between his spine and shoulder blades, he couldn't help but let his eyes fall half-lidded and allowed a tiny breath to escape. As the woman worked her thumbs into the knots in his back, Aidan fell further and further to the back of his mind, and all he could concentrate on was the blissful sensations his muscles were giving off.

Azula smiled into the backs of her hands as the tension in her back was soothed, and the strong hands of the man working it away began to rub the oil of her choice - honey and chamomile - into her skin. The towel clipped around her had been unclipped and re-clipped just around her hips, and the same with Katara, to give the masseurs better access to the lower back area, but she was lying on her stomach, so her chest was hidden anyway. Most of her tension was in her lower back, actually - something to do with cheerleading, she suspected.

Katara could almost feel the tangles of her own thoughts coming loose as her muscles were worked free with the spicy patchouli oils of her choice, and she was able to ignore everything but the released endorphins in her body. She did, at one point, manage to lift her head to take a glance at Zuko, whose chin was buried in the soft, upholstered top of the massage table, and whose eyes were shut in bliss, and mouth was twitching toward a rapturous smile, and this made her smile too; he could do with some relaxation time.

* * *

><p>Azula, Ty Lee and Mai met up at the mall after Azula's pampering session at the Dancing Dragon Day Spa, to make negotiations with Stephanie Jones, her twin lackeys, Coral and Pearl Avery and Stephanie's boyfriend, Mac, who acted as 'enforcement' in the dealings they made. They arranged to meet by the fountain in the middle of the glass-roofed plaza, opposite the food court.<p>

Stephanie was a girl of about Azula's height, with burgundy-dyed hair in a pixie-cut and way too much foundation on, who waltzed into the mall in denim shorts - they were technically shorts, but they looked to Azula like denim underwear, - fishnet tights, pink stilettos and a matching hot pink, low-cut spaghetti-strap tank top. Coral and Pearl were two blondes with platinum-blonde hair cut and layered above their shoulders, with dark brown eyes and California tans, aided by spray-on tans, short, nothing-to-the-imagination miniskirts and matching midriff tops with their names on them.

'_They __**would **__have to have their names on, so they don't forget,' _Mai had always said.

Mac, Stephanie's boyfriend, was a tall football player held back two years for his failure at mathematics. He dyed his hair the same color as Stephanie whenever she changed it - so they matched - and gelled it upward into little stupid peaks that Zuko had once gotten into a fight with the guy for calling 'proof that he's a dickhead'. Mac wore his jersey everywhere, as well as the predictable knee-length shorts that most men wore during the summer.

"Hello, Azula," Stephanie hissed, stalking up toward the three girls but training her vampire-themed contact lenses on Azula alone.

"You're late," the Scorsese girl stated nonchalantly. "Your manners are as bad as your perception."

Stephanie put her hands on her hips. "My what-now?" she raised an eyebrow, befuddled.

Rolling her eyes, Mai spoke up. "It doesn't matter. You have to stop with the pledges, before it gets too hard to."

Mac balled a fist and raised it threateningly. "You stuck-up snobs can't tell us what to do!" he growled viciously, careful not to attract unwanted attention. He was sick of people with more money always getting to cut in line, getting to the top of the popularity ladder just on principle; he had clawed his way to popularity, as had Stephanie and Coral and Pearl, and he wasn't about to let rich kids walk all over him.

"Yeah, no way!" Coral swiped her hand out in front of her in agreement.

Ty Lee held her hands out reasonably. "We're not trying to tell you what to do, we just don't want anyone to get hurt! Didn't you read the story in the news last summer?" she exclaimed, throwing her hands up in exasperation; she may have been a little dim, but these guys took the prize for it.

Stephanie crossed her arms and pointed in Ty Lee's direction. "Stay out of it, you little slut - we don't need advice from someone whose knees have never met!"

Mai stepped forward and ground her teeth, tilting her head down so her fringe nearly covered her eyes and holding a fist in front of her. "You talk that way about my friend again and I'll rip out your silicone tits and shove them up your boyfriends ass so far he won't be able to fuck your crusty hole until he's been to the emergency room," she smirked viciously, unclenching her fist and showing them sharp, black-painted nails with tiny skull decals on them.

Azula watched Stephanie through narrowed eyes. "Insults aren't getting us anywhere. I don't care if you want to have a sorority, do what you want; but I won't allow you to go into the Southern Forest for your pledges; especially if your pledges are going to include splitting up," she lifted a hand and inspected her manicure.

"You screw up my pledges again," Stephanie began, lifting a hand and running it over her pixie cut, "and I'll screw you up so bad even Daddy's money won't be able to help you, because you'll be _Six. Feet. Under," _she lifted her hand, stuck up her middle finger and turned away from them, stalking on those pink stilettos.

As Coral and Mac turned to follow Stephanie, Pearl put her hands on her hips. "That means you'll be dead!"

Mai lifted a hand to her face and pinched the bridge of her nose as Pearl trotted after her friends. When the trio was sure Stephanie and hers were gone, Mai looked to Azula, who was leaning against the fountain with her arms crossed and her brows down, looking rather irritated, and quite worried. "What now?" Mai spoke up.

Azula shut her eyes and sighed reluctantly. "I don't know."

* * *

><p>"So," Katara began with a full mouth, "How does it feel to be pampered?" she slid the napkin out from under her hotdog, walking along the boardwalk of the beach as she did so, with the sun going down on her right, and wiped up the ketchup slipping down her thumb. She balled up the napkin and tossed it to the bin, before taking her baseball and mitt from under her elbow, having wedged them between her arm and torso so she could eat, and smacked the ball into her palm.<p>

Zuko, holding a baseball bat over his shoulder, kept his eyes trained on the sunset and gave a laugh. "I'm wearing nail polish. And I smell like a pineapple raped me," he shook his head and loosened his grip on the bat on his shoulder. "Other than that, I feel pretty relaxed," he tore his eyes away from the sun to smile at Katara.

"Good," Katara nodded, after swallowing the last bit of her hotdog. "So, what was it that you wanted to talk to me and Azula about earlier?"

Zuko's smile weakened momentarily. "I want to do some surveillance tonight. On Aidan," he told her quite plainly, his ex-best-friend's name coming out like he was spitting nails.

Katara's head bobbed thoughtfully. "Sounds like a good idea; he must be staying with a relative right now, so that should be a good place to start. Should I get Toph to run his name through her system, or are we not telling the others about him?"

"I know where he's staying; with his brother, in the city," Zuko conceded carefully, and solemnly, "I don't think it's a good idea to tell the others just yet. If he gets too close, then we tell them, but if not, it's better if …" he paused and looked out to the water again.

Katara reached out and put her hand on his arm. "If you don't have to tell them about Noah," she finished for him, squeezing his arm gently.

The name hit him like one of the waves crashing on the shore. Zuko breathed a heavy, sigh, and then shook his head slowly, golden eyes reflecting the sunlight in shimmering sparkles that gleamed like fine jewelry in a well-lit jeweler's store. "I should've seen it," he murmured under his breath.

Katara squeezed his arm a little harder this time, her manicured fingernails digging into him slightly as she gave him a gentle nudge. "You couldn't have, Zuko. If you blame yourself … you'll end up like …"

'_Like?' _her mind asked her, _'Like you? Hunting revenge for your mother's murder, to undo what you should've prevented?'_

Zuko spoke again and she never finished what she'd begun to say. "I don't blame myself for it. I just … if I couldn't see it, how would I have stopped it?"

Katara frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"If he did it again, and I couldn't even see it, how would I be able to stop it?" he gave a tiny grunt that indicated to Katara that he was having an internal battle with his mind and logic. "I saw Noah every day, and I didn't even catch a hint that something was up. He could be doing it to anyone, even one of the gang … and we wouldn't even know."

Katara grimaced. "We'll just have to assume that whoever he's talking to, he's manipulating. We'll know if he makes any friends," she reasoned calmly, before nudging her friend reassuringly. "And then the Blue Spirit and Painted Lady can keep an eye out for them."

* * *

><p>Toph smacked her glass down on the counter and shook her head. "Come on, Suki," she panted, having guzzled down the last of her lemonade, her tongue burnt by the hot pizza they'd ordered - thirty minutes or less? Toph scoffed at the idea; the pizza had gotten there in ten minutes, still flaming from the oven, more or less. "Spill the beans - what derailed the paradise-train?"<p>

Suki shrugged and picked a piece of pepperoni off the pizza, popping it into her mouth and then using her tongue to peel the cheese away from the underside of it. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about, Duchess Bei Fong," she glanced to the television to see the wrestlers - she'd forgotten their highfalutin names already - tearing one another to shreds. One body-slammed the other into the corner of the ring and Suki winced at it.

Toph rolled her eyes and picked at the pizza crust on her plate; they had been faking titles since after school, to see how long it took for someone to come up and ask if they were serious, or say something about it. So far, the deliveryman had bowed politely upon delivering their food; maybe their fake titles had had something to do with the speed with which the pizza had arrived. "Well, Lady Suki, I believe I am referring to the fact that you and Snoozles are no longer doing the nasty-nasty."

Suki scowled at Toph. "You're so ladylike, Toph. I don't know why you don't get invited to more parties."

"Parties stink," the colorblind girl answered calmly, "now tell me what happened!"

Suki ran her tongue across her lower lip thoughtfully. She supposed she could tell Toph; Toph knew how to keep her mouth shut, and not spread gossip that would ruin Yue's social life. Suki laughed inwardly - she really was the better person, watching out for the reputation of the girl who'd fucked her boyfriend behind her back. And Yue would've had to know they were together. As Katara put it one day, the two hung off one another like drapes.

"You really want to know?"

"Yes!"

"Sokka nailed Yue Chander behind my back," Suki explained smoothly, plucking a piece of cheese from her slice of pizza.

Toph's mouth hung agape. "No way."

"Way."

The blind bandit sputtered for a moment, before finally finding her vocabulary and managing to speak clearly. "Why? When?"

Suki shrugged again and licked the cheese and tomato sauce from her finger. "Probably because he was horny and she was the closest thing he could fuck, and I walked in on 'em after your party," she watched the television with a lackluster interest that showed she wasn't at all entertained by the wrestling that Toph had put on the screen.

Toph smacked her hands on the counter. "You walked in on them?" she exclaimed, before laughing out and clutching her stomach with how hard she was chuckling. "Oh, Snoozles!" she sniggered, "EPIC FAIL!" she shook her head and then put it on the counter before her, laughing all the way.

Suki frowned, "I didn't think it was really that funny."

"What?"

"Well-,"

"Seriously? He got caught in the act - I can see the fail whale swimming through his head just as you walked out the door. I mean, Snoozles is dumb, but this takes the cake!" then Toph broke out in laughter again, laughing so hard her stomach was beginning to hurt. She grabbed some pizza crust and tried to chew it, but only ended up nearly choking.

Suki managed the tiniest smirk. "Okay. Maybe it's a little funny," she shook her head and lifted her own glass from the counter, beside Toph's head. "I hope, Duchess, that this stays on the down-low, because if it didn't Sokka would look like a little bit of a douche bag. And I'm taking the moral high-ground."

Toph lifted her head and wiped her colorblind eyes of laughter. "Yeah, yeah, sure," she snorted. "That's priceless-," she was interrupted by a knock on the door and a chime of the doorbell, and her face screwed up in confusion and annoyance. Glancing up to the clock, Toph saw that it was way past ten in the night, and anyone knocking on Suki's door at this hour was either a male stripper or just plain rude. Not that Toph really cared. She secretly hopes her first assumption was right.

Suki tilted her head one way. "I'm not expecting anyone else."

"Think maybe the Blue Spirit or Painted Lady are in need of some assistance?" Toph's next thought came out on her tongue, her fingers curling in toward her palm, crackling discreetly from their overuse in keyboard typing.

Suki hopped off the barstool with a piece of pizza in her hand and a piece of pepperoni in her mouth and walked out into the badly decorated hallway. She walked toward the front door and grabbed the door handle, immediately feeling like lightning had shot through her. The piece of pizza almost fell out of her hand, but then her fingers tightened on it, getting tomato sauce under her fingernails. Toph ran out behind her, seeming to have gotten that lightning shock too.

There was a loud rumble outside, immediately after the shock, and they recognized the sound of thunder; they hadn't known there was a storm before this moment. There was no storm in the skies, but you can tell a blind man about a rainbow as much as you like.

"Don't answer the door," Toph told her friend gravely, looking paler than usual.

But it was too late. The handle was already turned and Suki was pulling it toward her to see who was at the door. Toph's face seemed to twist in horror as Suki pulled the door back, because when the cheap doorway was opened out, the colorblind girl's father stood on the doorstep, and Toph could see their family driver, whom she hardly knew, out in the logic-defiantly clear night by the black car her parents got driven around in by the road, behind him.

"Toph," Lao spoke seriously, ignoring Suki completely, focused only on the horrified face of his daughter.

Toph's brows came down and she tried to put on a hateful expression, but only fear was written on the front of her head. "What's going on?" she asked; her parents never checked if she was home, unless they wanted something from her. So what could they possibly want or need her for? Where else had her father looked for her? Had he gone to Aang's house? Katara's?

Lao's eyes narrowed. "Come with me," he told her in dry, flat tones that she tried to dissect with her amazing mind, but couldn't.

With wide, pale green eyes, Toph shrank and took a hesitant step toward him. Suki watched her with parted lips and an expression that would've told them she was flashing back, had they been less fixed on one another. She began to believe there really _was _a storm, and it would go down as soon as Toph got into that serious black car and the door clicked shut, locking her in. Toph got outside into the clear night, and Suki could've sworn she looked like she was being rained on.

The shorter girl looked back with huge, sparkling eyes, asking for a rescue, but before anything else could be said, Lao had put a hand on Toph's shoulder, nudged her further out the door and further from the house, and shut the front door between them.

* * *

><p>Katara stretched calmly and silently, her arms spread up and out to the sky as she and Zuko walked along a rooftop toward the downtown apartment that he was sure Aidan was staying at with his brother. The two hopes from the roof of one building to the fire escape of the next, and climbed up to the roof, before continuing to stroll. Zuko was sure that if Aidan got up to anything tonight, it would be later rather than earlier.<p>

Her mask already fastened, Katara spoke up. "What do you expect to find tonight?" she asked curiously, her arms finding their places on her hips, on utility belt fastened to the harness that held her guns. "Drugs? Bodies? Clues?"

The Blue Spirit shook his head and took a long step onto a skylight, not bothering to look down. "No. I don't expect to find anything." His voice echoed inside his own head thanks to his mask, and his own mint-scented breath bounced back at him. "I want to study his habits. Know his weaknesses."

The Painted Lady raised an eyebrow beneath her mask and then tossed her head, her ponytail flicking at the cool night air in her mesmerized state. A tall building moved out of the way as they walked and the light of the three-quarter moon washed over both vigilantes. She breathed in its cool light as if it offered her some kind of secret power, and when she breathed it out, she opened her eyes and smiled at it. "Check it out," she murmured, eyes fixed on the bright orb, with its darkened quarter withheld from the eyes of the earth until the full moon.

Zuko was already looking at it when she told him to look. "It's beautiful," he smiled under his mask as a cool night breeze blew between them, taking the Painted Lady's ponytail with it and causing her to give a tiny laugh of excitement. The gold eyes beneath the blue mask moved from the moon to the stars, and then to his companion, who watched the sky as if waiting for something. _'Beautiful' _he repeated in his head, observing as the moon bounced off her in the most mesmerizing way.

He suddenly wanted to forget Aidan; to banish him to the back of his mind so that he could instead reach out to Katara, embrace her and then whisper - ever so gently - _'Can I kiss you?' _but Katara shook her head as if she were thinking upon how strange things were; not that they weren't, though.

Red-painted lips drew in a breath and then she was talking in her thoughtful, contemplative way. "I always feel like the moon is more significant than people think," she spoke quietly, as if only half sure she wanted him to hear her speaking.

"How so?" Zuko stepped closer to her, his eyes moving back to the moon.

Katara shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure," she turned her head to meet his eyes, but only saw the dark eye holes of his mask, so she looked back to the sky. "I can't help but think that maybe … the moon has some kind of influence on the world," and she cleared her throat quietly, looking away from it with a blush hidden by her mask. "It sounds stupid out loud," she gave a nervous laugh.

Zuko gave a smile beneath his mask and shook his head. "No, it doesn't," he assured her, before glancing back in the direction they had been walking in. "Come on, we'd better get a move on."

Katara nodded in agreement. "Yeah," she took the first step ahead of him and approached the edge of the roof. When she went to hop to the next, Zuko grabbed her wrist and pointed down, crouching. Katara's eyes followed where he was pointing and she saw he was pointing to a window on the building before them. In the light of the apartment, she could see that boy she'd met earlier grabbing a jacket from somewhere and walking in a manner befitting someone on their way out.

"He's going out. Come on!" Zuko wheeled a few steps back, then had a run up and shot himself from one roof to the next, gloved hands taking hold of the lip of the apartment building's roof. He hoisted himself up and began to run across the roof of the building to look down for the front door, eyes searching for Aidan's swaggering walk and cocky demeanor.

The Painted Lady walked back a few more steps than her comrade had and held her arms and legs in a swan-diving position as she crossed the space between one building and the next. When she made contact with the next roof, her hands hit the flat top surface rather than the lip Zuko had grabbed, and she kicked her legs over her head, and then rolled forwards on her back, tucking her knees back in until she got her feet under her and she found herself crouching. She stood and ran after Zuko, finding him watching the street below intently.

Katara's eyes had to search for a moment for Aidan, but they found the older boy crossing the street calmly, with an undeniable swagger to add to his confident expressions, walking toward a coke machine outside a 7/11. "Does coke count as a weakness?" she joked in a breathy whisper.

Zuko's mask turned to her but said nothing, and then he looked back to his subject. By the way his head had moved, Katara guessed he'd been giving her a displeased look along the lines of 'shut the fuck up'. Katara then figured she could be exaggerating in this, but his look had said something _like _that. Maybe it had been more like 'can we have a mutual seriousness right now?' but Katara didn't know. She laughed in her head at herself for trying to decipher his expression while he wore a mask.

Returning his eyes to Aidan, who now held a can of cola in one hand, and was walking down the street with a phone in the other. He seemed to be blindly dialing a number off by memory, with eyes dancing around suspiciously. Aidan hadn't thought to look _up, _Zuko noted with minimal satisfaction. After all, what would the Blue Spirit want with Aidan? Nothing. Truth be told, Zuko - alter ego aside - didn't really want much to do with him either.

Both masked figures moved, crouching, along the building in the unassuming way a shadow moves when you walk in the sun, following Aidan discreetly. Perhaps they chose the right moment on instinct, or perhaps they read one another's minds. Either way the two followed the ex-con with their feet moving on the roof as fingers do on a piano during an arpeggio. With some effort, the two crossed the gap between the apartment building and the office building adjacent to it.

They followed until Aidan came to a halt before a gas station to talk on his phone. The irony of that fact didn't hit Zuko, and was wasted on Katara, who found no humor in it. Once she saw that he was listening for an answer on the other end, Katara grabbed for her leather pants and drew out her own phone, which had been tweaked - just a little - by Toph in the same session that had resulted in that cheesy song playing each time Zuko called her. She opened a custom application Toph had scripted for her and aimed her phone at Aidan on the street below. The quiet ringing of a phone was audible from her phone, and the both of them knew it was picking up the signal of Aidan's phone clearly.

"_Hello?" _- a woman's - no, a girl's, voice.

"_Hello to you too," _- Aidan's voice was clear and crisp and confident.

There was a pause. _"Aidan?" _the girl's voice was excited, perhaps overjoyed. _"Aidan?" _she asked again to be sure.

Aidan chuckled on the line and then spoke again. _"Miss me, babe?" _he drawled in satisfaction.

The girl sounded like she was getting out of bed, because they could hear lights clicking on and the ruffle and rustle of someone getting dressed, a sound they would come to find humorous in a few weeks. _"Where are you? When did you get out?" _she asked quickly, and by her tone, Zuko and Katara figured she had - in fact - missed him.

Aidan answered in a vague, nonchalant tone. _"Don't you worry about that, babe; I'm downtown."_

She laughed enthusiastically. _"Me too. You aren't at-,"_

"_You know me too well," _Aidan cut her off. _"See you in ten, right?"_

She paused and then in a hesitant tone; _"Yeah."_

Aidan hung up.

Katara slumped visibly and stuffed her phone back in her pocket, eyeing Aidan with more contempt this time than before. The girl on the other end didn't even know he was just making a booty call. She was beginning to understand what Zuko had told her of Aidan's manipulative skills. Even she - a fifteen-year-old virgin - could see what this girl, who sounded older, couldn't. Before she could speak, the phone she'd just put into her leather pocket vibrated against her thigh.

Zuko looked to her at the sound of the vibration.

Katara pulled the phone out and shielded the light on the screen from anyone looking up, to see a name on the screen; _**'SUKI'**_. Her brows knit together and she glanced to Zuko for permission to answer, which he granted with a nod, before she tapped the screen's little green button, turning away from Aidan below and cupping her hand around her phone. "Hello?"

"_Katara?" _Suki's voice sounded worried and stressed. _"Are you there?" _and with that Katara realized she's paused initially.

"Huh? Yeah, yes, I'm here. What's wrong?" she asked carefully, almost wanting to reach through the phone and put a hand on Suki's shoulder.

"_Is Zuko with you?"_

Katara was taken aback, but she answered. "Yeah, he is."

"_Can you put him on?" _Suki asked with a sniffle, and both of them realized she'd been crying, or trying not to.

Zuko snatched the phone from Katara and put it to his ear, and somehow Katara wasn't offended by this; his services were required and he helped people who needed him. It seemed less that he was being rude and more that he was eagerly available to help wherever he could. He was a good friend. "I'm here."

"_I think Toph's in trouble."_

And that was why they abandoned their surveillance duty.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: CHAPTER DONE. Finally. I keep giving myself writer's block. Yep, so I'm a terrible person; I know for a fact that going to my dad's house gives me writer's block. And yet I keep going. What the hell is wrong with me? But, I know a remedy for my writer's block - it may not work for yours, but here's my remedy.**

**Rule 1, (the most important) ****Two WHOLE days, NO WRITING****. (Even if your writer's block goes before the days are over).**

**Rule 2, ****At least FOUR hours of good reading**** (BOOKS, not fan fiction) ****to be done in those two days****.**

**Rule 3, ****Watch at least TWELVE fan videos****.**

**Rule 4, ****Find a SINGLE long fan fiction story ****(20 chapters at least, preferably complete) ****and read it****.**

**Rule 5, ****keep DeviantArt open in your browser, search ZUTARA ****(or other favored ship name) ****and browse each time you get bored of playing online games.**

**Rule 6, ****have A4 pieces of paper and a pen. Use paper to write down words you'd like to remember for writing, as they come to you. Keep these papers handy when writing, and if you like, use them as inspiration for word-themed oneshots.**

**And that's how it works for me. Now then, RE-VIEWS for Reviews! YAY!**

* * *

><p>Zuko shrugged off Azula's hand. "No." he frowned, golden eyes still fixed on Katara. "I want you <em>out <em>of here, _right now._"

The brunette shook her head in disbelief. "I don't- Why?" she made a face.

"Because it's _your _fault Ty Lee got hurt in the first place." He hissed viciously, his eyes narrowed into slits.

Katara stared. _'Ouch, man. Seriously. __**Ouch**__'. _She shook her head again and continued to stare, her mouth falling open a little. _'You think I don't know that?' _Katara finally shut her mouth and regained seriousness. She looked to Azula. "Hey, where's Mai?" she looked about.

"She's-,"

Zuko interrupted. "Don't tell her." He whipped his head around to look at his sister.

Azula stared. "You … are … a sad little man." She shook her head, ashamed for him.

* * *

><p><strong>I say this word so much, if I were a pokemon, that would be what I was called. 'Reviews?'<br>**


	12. The Consequences

Toph's leg jumped on the floor repeatedly, her foot hitting against it nervously. She looked out the window of the aircraft hopelessly. She was going to jail. She knew it. There was a government agent - of which agency, she didn't know - sat beside her on the plane, boxing her into her window seat. Her father was sat in first-class, leaving her to sit alone in the business-class with a federal agent. _'Gee, thanks Dad; I don't know why I don't celebrate Father's day!' _she thought glumly.

It was Five AM, as she looked out the window to the darkened night sky as they flew over the Rocky Mountains. Sunrise was on the horizon, and in an hour or two, it would crop up and she would be on the other side of the country from her friends. She lifted her hands and rubbed at her face. She was tired, but she couldn't sleep. Not next to a guy who could easily inject her with some kind of knockout drug to take her to some secret prison or something.

Toph wondered if Suki had known to call someone; to call Zuko, or Katara or Aang. Or would she just be forgotten; the kid who moves school without telling anyone and just fades to the background? No. Aang would know something was up. If it took him a few hours to catch on, he'd figure it out. Suki was probably her best bet, though, she mused to herself. Suki would know she was in trouble, right? Suki would know.

She hoped.

* * *

><p>"She's not answering her phone. Something's really wrong," Zuko paced back and forth in Aang's kitchen, where the others were sat at the table drinking coffee by reason of their involuntary all-nighter. In his hand, he held Aang's phone, as he had tried calling from his, Katara's, and Suki's phones. The four of them wore unnerved expressions, their eyes pointed at their drinks.<p>

It was that dark haze between night and day, that fading hour where the darkness of the night glows into that hazy, creamy color of the morning. It was 6:04am, but they had only just left winter behind - they still stood in its ever-shrinking shadow, for now. Toph wouldn't have been awake usually - come to think of it, none of them would've. They'd be snoring in their beds, dreading the time when their alarms would spring them to life.

Aang put his elbow on the table and put his forehead into the soft cup he formed in his hand. "If she'd run away she'd have called me," he breathed out a heavy sigh of exhaustion and worry; he'd been woken up after a single hour of sleep at the news of Toph's disappearance, "or sent a text, or something," he added thoughtfully. "I don't understand why she would just vanish."

Suki shook her head and hiccupped, having sipped her coffee just a little too eagerly. "He took her somewhere; her father," Suki thought aloud, pensively and slowly, her mind turning circles of repetition and persistent panic, though none was apparent on her face. She wondered if Toph was finally getting in trouble for having a sleepover when she shouldn't have, or staying home from school that day after her birthday on account of her hangover - but Lao's expression had been far more serious than that.

Aang's front door opened and nobody looked up, bar for Zuko. They'd already known Sokka was on his way - Katara had called him. Sokka and Toph were close, and shared a friendship similar to that between siblings. Sokka would've wanted to know, and they couldn't neglect to tell him. They were turning a new page - no more secrets, no more lies. It seemed lies had all but torn them apart upon Lydia's campaign for the end of the world.

Sokka walked right into the kitchen and paid Zuko no ill regard - this was more important. "What do you guys know, and how can I help?" Sokka asked immediately, his phone still in his hand and his hair ruffled from what they might have assumed to be extreme driving. He held his phone in his hand as if he had tried to call Toph multiple times while driving, and he looked dazed, which to Suki looked like the result of him nearly killing himself while trying to call the Blind Bandit.

"We know she either can't use her phone or it's been taken away from her," Katara stood from her seat at the table and glanced from Suki to Sokka as if she could draw a line between them that could help them - as if linking them together might have helped the situation. "If - and I mean _if - _she has her laptop, she probably can't use it because she's being watched, probably by her father. What does that give us?"

Zuko frowned. "Her phone isn't even ringing, so that must mean she has it off. If she had it on silent, or just wasn't able to answer, it would go to a ring tone," he thought aloud.

Sokka finished his friend's train of thought for him. "And Toph never keeps her phone off, so it's been taken from her."

"But why wouldn't her father want her making any calls?" Suki made a questioning gesture with one hand, sitting at the table and allowing her fingers to move from the warmth of her coffee cup. "I mean, she's supposed to be in school today anyway, wouldn't she just tell us then anything he might not have wanted her to tell us?"

Aang swiped his fingers across the cheap plastic tablecloth on his kitchen table and brushed away a few remaining crumbs from his dinner last night. "Because Toph's not gonna be in school today," he pointed out in an authoritative tone that meant he was dead sure of this. "They went somewhere," and then he got up and extended his hand to Zuko. "Give me my phone, I want to call someone."

Zuko handed over the phone and crossed his arms over his chest. "Where do you think they went?" his golden eyes scanned over the others for an answer, fingers drumming on the leather of his upper arm - he and Katara had had to change before coming over, just in case they were seen.

"My best guess?" Sokka suddenly spoke up. "They probably went to the airport," he lifted a hand to his breast pocket and withdrew a tiny notepad and pen which he kept for writing notes at school - his exams were coming up and if he was smart about hiding (and or memorizing) the notes, he could ace them the same way he had last year. "It explains why they disappeared at such a random time, and why you can't get a hold of Toph's phone."

Katara looked to her brother, vaguely aware of Aang dialing a number on his cell. "But where would they be going? Where would he take her?"

Sokka opened his mouth to give another guess, but then shut it, without an answer. "I don't know," he looked off sideways, with a slightly disheartened tinge to his voice.

* * *

><p>At the request on his radio, nineteen-year-old Kirk Douglas, in his first rig - a gift from his pa, after the old man had finally decided her retire - tuned to the new channel and lifted his receiver from its holster on the dash. "Breaker, this is Hunt; what can I do you for?" he spoke into his radio amicably.<p>

"_Hunt, this is Hurricane back in the Flower Shop," _the voice of his old friend filled his ears and he laughed. _"Trying to get a 20 on my better half."_

"10-4, it's been a while, Hurricane!" Kirk replied into his receiver. "I have eyes and ears across the state. Tell me what'cha need, kid, and I'll do my best."

"_10-4_, _Hunt. Black BMW four-wheeler on the boulevard, between Flower Shop and Shaky Town, left a few hours ago. Motor City plates, tinted windows," _the radio crackled out fuzzily.

Kirk chewed his lower lip for a moment and then lifted his receiver again to his mouth. "10-4, Hurricane. Give me a second to ask around."

"_10-4, standing by."_

Kirk tuned into the Harley channel and pressed the side button on his receiver, clearing his throat and addressing the truckers across the state with his linear. "This is Hunt, requesting a 20 on a black four-wheeler with Motor City plates and blackout windows headed for Shaky Town. Repeat, Hunt, requesting a 20 on a black four-wheeler with Motor City plates and blackout windows headed for Shaky Town. Hurricane's better half is on the run, most likely got the pedal to the metal."

There was a brief pause.

"_10-4 on that, Hunt - Bluebird spotted a black BMW four-wheeler with Motor City plates and blackout windows pulled over on the side, getting an invitation from a Smokey about three hours ago near Shaky Town," _came the response from a woman who sounded like she was chewing tobacco.

"10-4, much obliged," Kirk turned the little tuner knob back to the channel where Aang was waiting for him. "Hurricane, this is Hunt, come in, do you read me?"

"_10-2, Hunt. Is there a 10-18 on that 20?"_

"Yessir, that car was spotted three hours ago near Shaky Town. Your better half is probably already in the air by now."

"_Thanks, Hunt. All of this is 10-35, so best not to repeat it anywhere. 10-3, Hunt."_

"10-4 on that," Kirk agreed.

* * *

><p>Aang unplugged his phone from the radio transmitter Toph had set up against his computer - Toph always liked to keep options open in case something went wrong. He thundered down the stairs, heels leaving impressions in the carpet with the speed he employed. His phone slid into his pocket and he raced into the kitchen, grabbing the doorframe to make sure he didn't slide across the tiles.<p>

"Sokka, you were right," he gave a panting breath. "The car was spotted near Los Angeles, _three hours_ ago," he continued, glancing up to the clock on the wall, which showed it was now nearing eight o' clock. They were supposed to be in school in a half hour. "They must be in the air."

Sokka grunted under his breath. "That might be why her phone is off," he thought aloud seriously, his eyes crossing the distance between himself and Zuko - the others seemed enveloped in their own minds, as if trying to find a way to fly up into the sky to save Toph. They had to come to a decision today; Toph was in trouble, but they couldn't wait around here all day. New information could come in, but if they were in school, they wouldn't get it. His eyes met the golden ones of the Scorsese boy. "One of us needs to cut school today - to wait here for any news. The rest of us might as well go to school."

Zuko nodded immediately, his expression dark and solemn. "Good idea."

"I'll wait here," Aang immediately piped up, his brows down and his arms crossed, his orange thermal pajama shirt stretched against the way his arms were crossed; he hadn't even bothered to get changed into his day clothes before beginning to search for Toph as best he could.

Sokka reached out and put his hand on the younger boy's shoulder. "No. I don't think that's a good idea."

Aang frowned hard and Sokka and slapped off the taller boy's hand from his shoulder. "Why not? If anyone needs to know if she's safe, it's me!"

"He has a point, Aang. You're too invested in this. You're going to worry, and get stressed, and before long you'll panic, and that's not going to help us find Toph. It's not what she would want you to do. She'd tell you to 'calm the fuck down and get a hold of yourself', and she'd probably punch you or something," Katara stood up from her seat and collected the empty coffee cups from the table, took them to the counter and set them by the sink.

Aang's frown deepened and he shook his head reluctantly. "Alright, fine," he murmured seriously. "So who _is _going to stay here?"

It was the kind of job Toph would've taken if she were there.

"Suki is," Zuko spoke up, breaking the auburn-haired girl from her foggy daze. He knew he had a reason for saying this, but at the moment, he couldn't pick it out just yet. Someone would point it out before he could, he was sure, so he had no hesitation about announcing this.

Suki looked up at Zuko. "What?" she asked incredulously, her voice coming out in a sleepy, slow drawl despite her efforts to stay alert. She looked as if she had just been asked to carry a hot coal across the Rocky Mountains. She stared at Zuko, awaiting an answer. After Katara's kidnap, and her percentage of culpability for it, they were ready to put Toph's rescue in her hands?

Sokka immediately agreed to this. "That makes sense," he nodded confidently, his mind submerged in plans for Toph's return, despite the fact that they had no idea where she was headed. His eyes turned on Suki, and he considered this idea and all its various pros and cons. "You're good with computers, you're great with communications, and people think you and Toph were together last night. If you cut school the same time as Toph, it'll look like you both got completely shit-faced and were too busy worshipping the porcelain god to go to class."

Suki nodded, suddenly aware that she was, in fact, the right person for the job. "Got it."

"Okay, guys - assuming we don't know anything new after school, I say we all go to Toph's house and have a snoop around. If Toph's mom is there, we'll ask her what's going on, if not, we're better off anyhow," Katara decreed determinedly, leaving the cups by the sink and leaning against the counter, eyes set on her friends.

Zuko took his phone from the table and put it into his pocket. "We only have a half hour to get ready. I'll see you guys there." He nodded to Katara, then Sokka, then Aang, then Suki, and proceeded to walk toward the door of the kitchen. As he passed, he gave Aang a gentle nudge in the arm, which only barely caused the boy to look up and give a weak smile, and he wondered if this situation even had a chance of ending well. He heard the others making plans to go home and get ready for the day, despite their lack of sleep.

* * *

><p>Toph didn't have much to work with, but both her father and the agent beside her had managed to keep their destination a secret from her. Suddenly it became algebra. They were heading east, and the plane's takeoff had been at 4:00am, and now it was 9:15am. She figured if she could find out when the landing time was estimated to be, she could find out where the plane was headed. Of course, she could've asked another passenger, if not for the agent next to her, who was probably there to keep her from doing so.<p>

The blind bandit looked to her right to see the agent leant back against his seat, thick sunglasses covering his eyes - probably the guy had seen too many spy movies, and watched 'Men In Black' a few too many times - with his lips parted and his neck against his seat in a most casual manner. He was asleep.

'_Looks like I might just be able to get somewhere with this,' _Toph thought to herself, wondering how far along her friend's investigation had come along.

She leant to her right somewhat, just enough to be able to get the stewardess' attention without waking the agent next to her. She put her weight on the armrest between herself and the man in the suit, and looked up, waiting for the stewardess to pass. When she finally did pass, Toph gave a discreet clearing of the throat that caught the woman's attention not by its volume, but by its discretion.

The flight attendant, a tall, skinny woman with extremely long legs and short, pert, jaw-length brown hair with blonde highlights, met Toph's gaze with a confused look on her face. "Can I help you?" she asked quietly, glancing carefully to the agent.

Toph whispered in a low tone. "Can you tell me when we're gonna be landing?" she glanced herself to the agent, with a carefulness that the stewardess hadn't seen before. The woman may have wondered if this was a terrorist thing, the strangeness with which the girl tried not to stir the man next to her.

"Uh …" the stewardess blinked for a moment before answering almost silently. "We'll be landing in about an hour and a half, at quarter to eleven," she answered kindly, straightening upward and giving Toph a genial nod, then walking down the aisle to help a man with something.

Toph frowned and did the math in her head. From 4:00am to 10:45am was six hours and forty-five minutes. They couldn't be flying across the ocean, that was for sure, but they _were_ landing on the east coast. Toph grumbled in a low tone, settling her back against her seat and wishing the stewardess had told her which airport they were going to land in. Then she'd have been able to know for sure where she was headed. If even she could communicate to her friends that she was on a _freaking plane,_ traveling east, that would be something, but her phone was in her father's pocket, turned off, somewhere else on the aircraft. With a tiny grunt, Toph shut her eyes. _'I'd better catch some sleep before we land,' _she reasoned with herself, beginning to feel tired after a long night of being essentially kidnapped.

She'd find out soon enough where they were landing.

* * *

><p>"<em>The night we met I knew I, needed you so, and if I had the chance I'd, never let you go,"<em>

"Dance with me," Aang murmured softly, into the shell of Toph's ear, causing her to squirm at the tickle. The radio was playing in the background, and there was some radio show on supposedly 'bringing back the oldies'. Aang particularly liked the oldies. Toph couldn't say she disliked this one.

Toph frowned and stared down at her homework, trying particularly hard to focus on the paper and squeezing the pen in her hand. "I can't, Twinkletoes. I'm not flunking math again," she insisted, before scribbling down an answer to a question she'd been stuck on for a few minutes. She hadn't 'flunked' math at all, she'd just gotten a 'B' where she preferred an A - in algebra. She was particularly good at algebra, and so she'd been kind of pissed at getting a 'B+'. Now she was working on equations, but just because she hadn't flunked equations before didn't mean she planned to.

"_Oh, won't you say you love me, I'll make you so proud of me, we'll make them turn their heads, every place we go, oh won't you please,"_

With a breathy sigh, Aang put his hands on Toph shoulders and glanced down at the homework momentarily, knowing the answer to a relatively simple question. He opened his mouth to tell her, but he promptly shut it, knowing she hated to be helped. He gently pressed his thumbs into her back and tested against the knotted muscles in her back. "You need to relax," he said soothingly. He was right, of course - the reason she wasn't seeing the answers was because she was focusing too hard.

Toph leant back from the work and let her pen go, melting into the back of the chair as Aang worked at her muscles. "I know," she grunted, shutting her eyes and giving a breath. He was right, of course, but she'd never say it like that. She may have said 'yeah, I know', or 'well, duh' sometimes when he made a good point, but she hadn't once told him 'alright, alright, you were right, I was wrong'. Because, when she eventually did tell him he was right, the given opposite would be having to admit she had been wrong, and to be honest, she wasn't looking forward to the day she admitted to being wrong.

"_Be my, be my baby, be my, be my- Say you'll be my baby- my, be my baby, be my, be my- be my little baby- be my, be my- be my little darling, be my baby now, oh, oh, oh, oh,"_

Toph pushed the chair back and lifted a hand to her own should, catching Aang's hand between hers and her shoulder. "I don't know why I'm panicking - it's not even due 'til Monday," she gave a self-scolding scoff. It was Saturday night. She stood and put a hand to Aang's cheek, holding it with her thumb and pulling it for her to peck him on the cheek. "But I'm not dancing with you," she reminded him. "I can't dance worth a shit."

Aang caught her by the waist. "Can't, or won't?" he teased softly.

* * *

><p>"Aang?" Sokka repeated, carefully shaking Aang by the arm. It was 10am; first break time - they had fifteen minutes to confer before they had to get to class.<p>

Aang's eyes fluttered - he actually noticed they hadn't been shut and he'd been sleeping with his eyes open - and finally focused on Sokka. "Huh? What?" he murmured groggily, lifting a hand to rub at the dryness of his eyes caused by sleeping with them open.

Sokka's brows tilted upward and his lipped thinned against one another. "You don't look so good, Aang," he gave a breath of concern. "I take it you don't pull too many all-nighters," he assumed calmly, leaning away from Aang on that bench out on the far edges of the school's three-acre lawn. Sokka slid his hand into the pocket of his varsity jacket and touched the bottle of energy pills his coach had given him, wondering if they would help or hurt his friend.

Aang shook his head vigorously and opened his eyes widely, waking himself up. "Don't worry about it, Sokka," he gave the older boy a brief smile and looked back to the school, to see Zuko walking over from the building. He was holding what looked like a scrunched up laminate flyer for that Stephen King show the drama committee was putting on in one hand at his side. "Hey, where's Katara? I thought she was going to meet up with us."

Sokka screwed up his face and decided to ask Zuko when he got here - as much as he hated to admit it, Zuko knew his sister better than anyone, including himself. It might have had something to do with the fact that Zuko and Katara were secretly hopelessly in love with each other and thought they were so fucking smart that nobody else had figured it out. It could've had something to do with the undeniable truth that Katara and Zuko had been on good terms with one another when Katara had refused to speak to her brother.

Zuko got within range to speak without yelling - nobody wanted anyone else to know Toph was missing - and continued approaching while drawing out a pack of Benson & Hedges from his pocket, flicking up a cigarette into his hand and then slipping the pack back into his pocket. He found his lighter in another pocket, lit his cigarette and brought it to his lips, remembering he hadn't had a cigarette since before his spa day the day prior. "Anybody know anything new?" he asked, sinking down to sit on the grass six feet from the others.

"Nothing yet," Sokka breathed out heavily, leaning back against the bench. "But unless they're leaving the country, they should be landing soon," he reasoned pensively, lifting a hand to his chin and rubbing at the stubble there. _'Aw, shit, I forgot to shave this morning,' _he groaned in his head.

Zuko nodded in agreement, dragging in a long breath of smoke and then blowing it to the air. "That, or they've already landed."

"Toph's going to find a way to let us know when she lands; we'd know if she was on the ground," Sokka countered confidently - he was sure Toph would find a way to get through to them once she had her feet back on the floor. Whether or not it meant hacking through a microwave oven to do it, she would make contact with them.

Aang piped up curiously. "Hey, where's Katara?"

Zuko suddenly grimaced, glancing over his shoulder back to the school as if expecting Katara to come running over, panting and apologizing for being tardy. "Good question," he murmured instinctively, and put his hand in his jeans pocket, searching for his phone to call the girl with the blue eyes.

"Don't worry about it, Zuko," Sokka waved a hand at the Scorsese. "She's probably in the library or something. We'll see her in English later."

Zuko hesitated and then nodded, releasing his phone and pulling his hands free, crossing his arms over his chest.

"What's that?" Aang asked, pointing to the flyer in Zuko's hand.

Zuko lifted his hand and showed them the scrunched up flyer as he inspected it himself. "Some drama club rep gave me a flyer for that crappy show. Like I'm gonna go sit for two hours and watch them butcher a good book," he grumbled in condescending, critical annoyance. "That's what you get for being nice to some people."

"What do you mean?"

With a breath and a long blink, Zuko considered telling them all about the wrestling jocks making jokes and shoving the short, slight freshman kid who'd been handing out the flyers and how he'd gotten them to back off by threatening to slash the tires of their cars while they weren't looking, and how the kid had instantly regained himself to advertise the show and try to cram flyers down his throat. He shook his head and decided against it. "Long story."

A long and awkward silence ensued, all three of the boys looking off in different directions, seeming not to have much else to talk about. In that strange silence, they realized that without the girls - Toph, Suki and Katara - they really wouldn't be friends at all. They separately recalled Toph saying that Katara was 'the warm sticky, pastey stuff that glues us all together', or something along those lines.

"Dude," Sokka gave a mocking scoff of incredibility, and Zuko was sure he was looking at him. "Are you wearing nail polish?"

Aang's ears perked and he sat straight immediately. "What?"

Zuko promptly left his cigarette between his lips and stuffed his hands into his pockets, hiding the manicure he'd been forced to get. "No!" he barked suddenly at Sokka, brow furrowing. In opening his mouth, his cigarette had fallen from it, into his lap. "Ah!" he jumped, pulling his hands from his pockets and picking up the smoke from his thigh with one hand and patting at the area with the other for any burning embers of it.

Then Aang grabbed one of his hands - the one without a cigarette in it - and tugged it up to inspect. "When did youget a manicure, Zuko?" he asked curiously, admiring tended cuticles, polished, buffed nails, pampered skin and what smelled like some kind of honey-scented hand moisturizer.

Zuko snatched his hand back from Aang and scowled at Sokka. "Wow, Sokka, _thanks," _he feigned as if he were happy Sokka had brought up the subject. "And it's not the first time I've worn nail polish," he murmured darkly.

"What?" Sokka's brows shot up and a grin found its way onto his face.

Zuko, realizing his mistake, suddenly rebutted. "That's not what I mean!" he sputtered awkwardly. "I mean … Katara-,"

Aang nudged Sokka with his elbow. "Yeah, he let Katara give him a makeover to cheer her up, and she pasted nail polish and lip gloss and eye shadow and mascara and all that girly shit all over him," he pointed out, as if he were helping the situation by telling Sokka this. He hardly noticed Zuko facepalming himself, or Sokka sniggering behind his throat as he continued. "She even tied his hair up into a silly little," he did a little dance with his hands over his head to illustrate, "thing."

Sokka was howling.

"Shut up, Aang!" Zuko snapped at the shorter boy.

Wiping at his eyes and clutching his stomach, Sokka regained enough composure to talk. "Wait-, wait, wait, wait," he began, still giggling incontrollable, "there's no way my sister could've done a manicure like that - she can barely keep the nail polish off the skin," he pointed out, sitting upright and taking in a deep breath to keep himself from laughing. "Suki, maybe, but Katara? No way."

Zuko murmured something. "K-ar-a 'n 'Zula … ma' me … hafta … ge'ra spa … package …"

"Huh?" Aang tilted his head to one side, trying to hear the Scorsese better.

"Katara and Azula made me have to get a fucking _spa package!_" he yelled at the others, pulling his cigarette out of his mouth and scowling at his friends darkly. Then he shoved his cigarette back into his mouth and dragged in a long and miserable inhale of tobacco. He recalled nearly coughing blood in the steam room at the freaking spa, as the steam worked at the damage done to his lungs by the smokes. Zuko imagined, briefly, quitting the cigarettes.

Sokka and Aang both stopped laughing at the sound of something curt and sudden.

Suddenly there was a shout from the tarmac grounds around the school, and they looked up. Someone was yelling something repetitively. The boys playing football on the grass between the school and the bench where Aang, Sokka and Zuko sat, immediately stopped still and picked up their ball, turning their heads to the voice and listening seriously. Sokka narrowed his eyes as if it would help him decipher what being yelled across the grass.

"_Fight! Fight! Fight!"_

Then everyone within earshot was running toward the voice chanting the same, cheering as if a brawl was any form of entertainment.

* * *

><p>Katara was curled up on one of the large, comfortable, plush chairs in the library, enveloped in her 'Dark Tower' book with the tip of her tongue gently held between her teeth as she tried to focus on the book instead of other things. It was amazing how hard it was to focus on one thing when there were four thoughts in your head, three of which were desperately trying to get your attention. The first thing was the book, which was getting harder and harder to concentrate on, and the second was Aidan, whose eyes she could feel on her back from the other side of the room, near two girls desperately trying to get <em>his <em>attention.

The third thing being Toph, she was having a hard time settling into the book without wondering about her friend at every corner.

That fourth and final thing was Zuko. Since, in her book, Roland and Susan had begun seeing eachother in secret, she'd found it harder and harder to push that kiss at The Aristocrat to the back of her mind. She remembered his hand on her shoulder, and hers on his chest, and feeling a knot in her stomach that she may have compared at the time to terror, but in hindsight, she recognized as excitement. It had lasted, in her head, as long as she'd wanted it to. And yet, she hated herself for turning away from it.

She cursed herself for breaking off such an amazing kiss.

Then, on the back of her neck, she felt something warm; she felt a chuckling breath on her skin. She stiffened and quickly shut her book on the bookmark, tossing her head and the curling up-do she'd styled her hair into that morning on such short notice. She leant one way to look behind her and saw Aidan's amused face. He had been either reading over her shoulder or just leaning there … _smelling _her?

She felt her cheeks flash pink - it felt as if he'd invaded her memory, as if he'd interrupted the kiss between her and Zuko. It felt as if he had read her mind. Then Katara realized he _had _been reading over her shoulder; reading the sex scene between Roland and Susan, and he was chuckling as if love was somewhat below him. The Marina girl gave herself a second to consider the romance between the gunslinger and his love, or more the fact that Zuko had already read it through. She wondered if Zuko would've responded to Susan's mild encouragement to Roland; _'If you love me, then love me.'_

Katara shook her head, almost trying to physically shake off the thought, her blue eyes locking with Aidan's gray-green ones. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that!" she scolded him instinctively, only remembering afterwards Zuko's warning to not palaver with this boy. Damn - palaver? - She was even _thinking _in 'Dark Tower' language!

Aidan gave a minimal smile of amusement, eyes giving a small glint of entertainment. "I know; it's a really bad habit of mine," he gave a long, thoughtful blink, and then resettled his eyes on her as if sizing her up. He supposed if he could get her to speak again, he could be sure of what he suspected by the sound of her voice. There was a subtle difference in the throat of a person who'd overdosed on certain medicines, and he was sure he detected it in her speech. "But it's so much fun."

Katara watched him through narrowed, blue eyes, for a split moment over her shoulder. Then she decided there was no point in exchanging any word with him - it was a pointless risk and nothing good could possibly come of it, and so she swung her legs off the seat and got her sneakers on the floor, getting to her feet and gripping her book hard, reminding herself not to hit him with it. She wondered why she wanted to hit him - he hadn't done anything yet. _'Yet?' _came a teasing voice on her shoulder; that long-absent devil of hers. _'Someone's a little tense,' _the devil chortled mirthfully. In her mind, Katara had a short discussion with it as she got up.

'_Where the fuck have __**you **__been?' _she asked the little voice in her head. She wondered where the contrasting angel, who had once lived on the other shoulder, was, but eventually the train of thought ended with a conclusion that over time, Katara had learnt to be her own conscience. _'I've been going fucking crazy without you to tell me how to be a deviant.'_

'_Sorry,' _the devil shrugged calmly, swinging its arrow-headed tail and batting its demonic red wings as if threatening to take flight again. _'You've been repressing me.'_

Katara mused on whether it was normal to have a conversation with an invisible anti-conscience, or whether it was pre-schizophrenia. _'Oh, yeah. Sorry about that,' _she answered in her head, as if it forgave something she couldn't have possibly prevented her own mind from doing, grabbing her rucksack and walking past Aidan, past the librarian's desk and out the door into the corridor. She held her back by one strap and dropped her book into it, before zipping it up and throwing it over one shoulder.

"Great! Where are we going?" she heard a voice beside her and turned her head to see Aidan walking next to her. He smacked his hands together and then rubbed his palms against one another as if expecting to go on some great journey while following her. Then he stuffed his hands into his pockets, tossed his imitative, black-dyed hair so it stuck to the side of his face.

Katara eyed him darkly and tried to ignore him, turning into the stairwell and walking down the steps.

Forcing herself not to say another word, Katara continued walking. Toph called for her attention, coming into the foreground of her mind. She would've breathed a heavy sigh of regret if not for Aidan hot on her heels. She wondered if Toph was alright; if she could've done anything to help her in the few hours between school the day before and the disappearance of the Blind Bandit.

Eventually, Aidan bored of following her around in silence, his irritating aura not seeming to get past her exterior shell of hard, emotionally impenetrable confidence - a kind of confidence he hated in people generally, but never mind, he had always been able to pick through that shell like broken glass from a window frame. The older boy had ultimately decided to go bother someone else, Katara had been sure, and had decided to catch up with the others before she had to go to class, when there was a shout on the other side of the corridor.

"_Fight! Fight!"_

Then everyone else around her was jostling her in the hall, running to get to wherever the fight was.

* * *

><p>Not having found out who had had a fight earlier, but a half hour later, Katara was sat in her English lesson with a sour expression on her face. Katara looked behind Zuko to see if Aidan was behind him, and thankfully, he wasn't. As soon as Donovan stepped out of the class, Katara planned to slip Zuko a discreet note informing him that Aidan had tried to talk to her in the library. She also gave her brother a careful glance, having a good guess that Sokka had known something about the fight. She guessed also that one of Sokka's football buddies had been involved in the fight.<p>

Maybe that quarterback she'd had a crush on in freshman year. What was his name? Darren? Damien? Sokka just called him 'Wimpy Shit' because in his role of the team, he always ended up smashing the other team's players away from the Dahlia Coast Public High Bandits quarterback. Sokka was the 'keep the other team away from the quarterback' guy in a football team. Katara didn't actually know the actual term; it may have been guard, or something like that. And as for 'Wimpy Shit', during the game he'd act like a big shot and reap all the glory, when really it was Sokka who did all the rallying and strategizing with the team beforehand.

'_One day,' _Sokka had told her once, _'I'm going to be quarterback for the Dahlia Coast Bullets, and all my hard work is going to pay off,' _he'd finished mirthfully, as a reply when she'd asked what he had been doing practicing so late - he'd come home at eight at night. Apparently he would practice sometimes with some of the other team members playing four-a-side after school, when wimpy shit had gone home. Sokka seemed to love being quarterback. He came home glowing when he played like that. Katara realized her big, dorky older brother was just a kid inside, just like everyone else.

Katara herself was just playing dress up at night, when she was the Painted Lady.

Toph was playing 'shop' when she was selling shit over the web.

Aang was just playing a one-player version of 'catch-me-if-you-can' when he ran track.

Donovan burst into the room carrying a huge load of paper, slapping Katara out of her daydream and causing most people in the class to jolt. The burly woman, who would oscillate between giving of a 'fat old lady' vibe and a 'crooked old witch' vibe, smacked the papers all down on the desk in a huge thump, and the students got the impression the teacher wasn't in a good mood. Then again, when was she?

"Class," she barked aggressively, like a dog considering going for the mailman. "Take out your exercise books and open them to a blank page!" she grabbed her trusty ruler and smacked it on the stack of papers as if threatening to paddle their asses with it. She grabbed, with her free hand, for the textbook on the left corner of her desk and snatched it up, holding it by its spine. She momentarily released the ruler to clatter on the desk, flicking through the pages of the textbook.

Katara leaned aside and stuck her hand into her rucksack on the floor, using the other to hold it open so she could recognize her book by its blue cover. Her science book was a bright green, her math one a sunshine yellow, her Spanish book red … _'Ah!' _she pulled out her English book and put it on the desk in front of her, before delving her hand deeper into her bag for a pen amongst the pencil shavings and hidden, stashed secret notes she hadn't wanted her teachers to find. She finally found a ballpoint and sat up, flicking her book to the nearest blank page.

Zuko gave Katara a nudge with his elbow. When she looked at him, he leant closer and whispered into her ear. "You didn't show up outside," he rasped under his breath, which (though she'd never tell him) she mused later to herself with a bubbly, badly-hidden smile, was hot against her neck as he whispered. "Where were you?" he added tersely and soberly.

Katara drew her shoulders up for a moment as if she didn't want to answer. She asked herself why she was tensing up - Aidan shouldn't have bothered her _at all! _He'd said only two sentences to her, and yet she felt like he'd read both into her book - which any reader will tell you is an invasion of privacy - and her _mind. _She felt like he'd read her like a book, or at least tried to. By the end of their short altercation, Katara had felt like she'd given something away, and she felt now in hindsight like he had wanted to know more.

"I was in the library," Katara whispered in a clipped tone identical to his, trying hard not to burst out and tell him everything - she needed to remain calm and objective. Today wasn't about Aidan, it was about finding Toph and making sure she was safe. Everything else needed to remain on hold. Including whatever their romantic situation was. "But Aidan tried to talk to me so I left," she added carefully; she knew keeping it secret would only complicate things.

No More Secrets.

Zuko simply nodded - she didn't see it but she felt the distance between them lessen - and then pulled back from her, putting pen to paper and looking up to see Donovan (or Prudence, whichever you prefer) watching them both with a dark and condemning look on her face. With a grimace and a grumble, Zuko leant back and watched as the woman approached the chalkboard with a piece of chalk in her fingers.

It clawed on the black-green surface, screeching insidiously with the sliding sound of a wire brush on steel. There was a silent cringe that occurred throughout the classroom, and each student ground their teeth to distract themselves from the scraping whine of the chalkboard and subsequent buzzing of their teeth. When she was done writing, she turned and glowered at the class apprehensively.

'_I before E, except after C,' _was written on the chalkboard.

"Who here had heard the rule on the board before?" Donovan picked up her ruler again and smacked it into her palm, as if she were going to hit someone if they happened not to know a particular answer.

Most of the class sheepishly put their hands up. Lydia didn't bother; she was too busy reading a text under the table. She'd earlier sent her mother a text informing her that she'd forgotten her wallet in her car, which was in the shop after a drunken asshole had sideswiped her for not getting in a drag race with him. So, she didn't have a ride home - no money for the bus, no car thanks to drunken moron, so, all in all, pretty much screwed.

'_Working late at the lab - my assistant is going to pick you up, but you'll have to hang out here for a while,' _read the text from Katherine Roberts, and Lydia pulled a face, but accepted it and moved on.

When she looked up, flopping her layered hair out of her face, Donovan was watching her with narrow eyes and she realized everyone was dead silent. With a gulp, she also realized everyone's eyes were fixed on her, and had been as she checked the text on her phone. She met the teacher's eyes and remembered that she wasn't happy with her for the outburst on behalf of Katara Marina and Jin Territa. _'I can see this isn't going to be my lucky day,' _she mused to herself dryly, feeling her phone vibrate - indicating a new text. She clutched her phone tighter in her hand.

Ms. Donovan cleared her throat and took a long blink as if premeditating her words. "Miss … Roberts …" she began in a quite civil tone, and then she ground her teeth, extending her hand and motioning for Lydia's phone the way she had for Zuko's iPod about a week ago, a rosy pink palm indented with crescent shapes from her fingernails. "Give me your phone."

Lydia felt any bravery left in her dissipating, and she slowly rose from her seat, her phone in her hand at her side. She approached Donovan's desk, passing Katara's and Zuko's to get there, and then lifted her hand, looking down, silently and submissively offering her phone. The teacher snatched it from her and then, much to Lydia's horror, looked at the screen.

"Why don't we see what's _so _important that it couldn't wait until after class," the teacher announced to the class with a complacent and smug expression on her face.

It wasn't out of bravery but instinct that Lydia protested. "What?" she suddenly snapped, brows coming down. "But-,"

"Sit down, Roberts. Before I send you to detention for the rest of the day."

Lydia back away from Donovan, screwing up her face miserably and then turning back to her seat and flying back into it, glaring up at Donovan. She seriously hoped Donovan just read her mother's text and left it alone. She was already having a shit day.

To her horror, Donovan opened the new text - it was really more of a letter - and read aloud.

"From _Alistair," _the old woman spat mockingly, and every girl in the class felt empathy for the girl burying her face in her hands. _"Lydia. Days are wearing on and I can't help but await your return to London. I continue to find myself alone, despite the company we agreed we were able to acquire and keep. It would be selfish to hope you feel as miserable as I do, and yet I wonder whether I do. Your father continues to press me on matters of your occupational decisions - whether you have chosen his footsteps or your mothers in which to follow - and I can never answer with much more than a guess. It's as if these years could be endless. Love always. Alistair."_

Lydia removed her face from her hands and looked up at the woman, glaring bloody murder at her. Donovan, oblivious to the green-eyed stare fixed on her forehead, willing beams of radioactive energy to splice through it, tossed the phone carelessly to her desk where it tumbled into a cup of pencils, which tilted, threatening to fall, but then fell back solid on its allocated spot.

The phone was rather expensive - it was the new iPhone - even for Lydia, and so she cringed when it tumbled against the desk, though she was too overwhelmed with hurt and anger and hate that she paid it the attention she would've otherwise. She didn't fully register the change in Zuko's expression at the mention of a preexisting lover of hers.

_Honor, _she reminded herself. His honor was not intact if he had bedded another man's woman, or something like that. Lydia supposed she'd better explain to him about it after class, perhaps when she'd calmed down enough to exchange words with anyone.

"How touching, Miss Roberts," the woman tilted her head one way, and smiled at Lydia with mock congratulations. "Since your lover is so wonderfully poetic and correct, it's only fair to assume you are the same. Now then; I before E, except after C, is a rule in practice within many words, so name _two _for me."

Lydia ran her tongue across her lower lip, apprehensively glaring at Donovan. "Ceiling," she began slowly, with a sharp bite desperately wanting to come from her throat, "and _receipt," _she continued, her teeth clenched in her head and her sharp green eyes fixed on the stack of papers on the teacher's desk. As soon as se saw Donovan's grin beginning to form, she shot her down with her carefully prepared reply. "Although in Britain they've completely stopped teaching students the 'I before E' rule, as a result of the fact in twenty-one times as many cases as it _is _true, it is false."

Donovan's mouth was left open for a moment before she grabbed her own hips and brought her brows _right _down. "False? Dear child, my teaching knowledge was built upon the 'I before E' rule! I have never come across a word that does not follow said rule!"

Lydia nearly pulled a face of exasperation, _'Well, that certainly explains a lot, now doesn't it?' _and then she decided to entertain the teacher for a short while; she knew she couldn't get back at her _fully _this lesson, but she would, eventually. Mark her words, she most certainly would. "Hacienda, concierge, ancient, species, science, sufficient, policies," she stopped and glanced around herself to see people spelling the words out in their heads and then seeing her point.

Donovan's eyes narrowed and then she pulled on one of the muscles in her upper lip, causing it to become shaped like the letter 'S', laid on its side. "Silence," she then murmured 'insolent child' under her breath before continuing, but Lydia was neither offended nor even aware of this. "Class - open your textbooks and turn to page three hundred and ninety four; introduction to etymology."

"I don't have my textbook, Ms. Donovan."

Donovan rolled her eyes and snatched Zuko's right out of his hand. "I'll photocopy you the page then. Does anyone else need a photocopy? One, two … three … okay, I'll make four copies," and she turned on her heel, marched for the door, turned again, glared at Lydia, turned once more and stalked out into the hallway.

Lydia hadn't known she was holding her breath until she gave a ridiculously heavy breath and dropped her forehead to her desk, her brows down and her arms up on the desk around her head. This was a really - like _really - _bad day. She lifted her head just a tiny bit, only to bump her forehead against the desk on purpose - she wondered if she was trying to knock herself out.

"Lydia," Katara's voice came at a whisper, and Lydia looked up to see Katara's huge blue eyes watching her with - no way - _concern _(?) in them. "Are you-,"

Lydia snapped before she could stop herself. "It's none of your business," she said sharply.

Katara bit her own lip and looked away, abashed.

Zuko turned in his seat and let his eyes fall on the blonde. "Hey, she was just being nice," he pointed out dryly, eyes narrowed and peering at her pensively. "And - _by the way - _it would've been nice to know you had a boyfriend before we hooked up," he added tersely.

Lydia scoffed. _"Boyfriend," _she repeated as if he were joking. "Firstly, my business is no longer yours, alright, Scorsese? And secondly, he's not my boyfriend; he's my fiancé. When I learnt I had to come to America we decided we were able to see other people until I went home. Didn't like the idea of a long-distance relationship."

Zuko had no comeback for that. "Oh." He was about to question her age and subsequently, the idea of her being engaged, but then remembered what high-class families were like. Hell, he was lucky he himself wasn't engaged at this point, having been accepted to Harvard.

Katara jumped into the fray. "Donovan was way out of line for reading your text out," she shook her head solemnly. "Thanks for sticking up for me and Jin last time, by the way."

The ghost of a smile appeared on Lydia's face. "Don't mention it. Again - she was out of line."

"She seems to overstep that line a lot," Katara pointed out.

Lydia gave a tiny laugh. "Yes. She does."

Katara glanced to Zuko for a moment and then she grabbed her own pocket, pulling out her iPhone. "Here, I can do you a favor - I'm going to switch your phone with mine," Katara offered Lydia with a smile, before lifting her free hand, on which a long finger was extended. "Because it sounds to me like you need your phone right now."

Lydia frowned at Katara. "Why would you do that?"

Katara was already leaning forward and switching the phones. "Well, I'm a really nice person. I'm like a girl Robin Hood," she glanced teasingly at her nearly-almost-sort-of-boyfriend.

Zuko rolled his eyes at his nearly-almost-sort-of-girlfriend and turned around in his seat as the burly old substitute-turned-permanent-but-not-for-long teacher burst into the room.

* * *

><p>Toph's eyes danced frantically around the airport as soon as they got into it. Her father's hand was clasped around her wrist - at first she had thought he was babying her again, but then she'd realized, by his grip, that it was to make sure she didn't try to get away. The man who'd sat next to her on the plane walked in front of them; he led them out of the airport as soon as airport security had deemed them safe to leave.<p>

She could tell things were only going to go downhill from here, when she spotted a car pulling up - a black SUV - in front of the airport, and realized the agent before her was leading her straight to it. That car was going to take her somewhere especially hard to get away from; she could tell just by the seriousness of the way her father approached it beside her. He was walking as if he just needed to get her to the car and then there would be no more risk left. At this epiphany, Toph struggled against her father's grip, trying to get away - she had a much better chance of getting home on her own that with that son of a bitch. Lao's grip tightened until she felt her fingers tingling, and she stopped struggling, and shot him an angry glare that he didn't notice.

Maybe she could get some news to her friends - by now they had to have figured out she'd been on a plane, with her phone off and the amount of time she'd been missing, and may even have guessed she'd been headed East. She knew for a fact she was too far for them to fly out and help her, but something could be done - she was sure of it. She needed to text them at least that she had landed, and if she could, she wanted to tell them where.

Having decided she needed her phone to text her friends, and she pretended to trip into her father, jostling him quite roughly and feeling her phone in his pocket. He eyed her carefully as she seemed to regain her footing with some fake apologies thrown in. She pointed out her untied shoelaces and shot him a steady glare, which he returned for several moments before fixing his eyes instead on the car waiting for them up ahead.

As soon as Lao was distracted, Toph's free hand was shoved into his pocket and her phone came free without him noticing. She slipped the phone into the back pocket of her jeans and continued to walk with him to the car that the agent opened for them. Lao ducked into the car first, and then the agent put his hand on Toph's head and pushed her down and into the car, before getting in himself, trapping her between him and her father. Toph squirmed in her seat; just to be sure her phone was still in her pocket. She glanced at her father, and then at the agent, and neither knew she had her phone back. She could tell that much.

Her father then released her wrist and she was able to put her hands at her side, discreetly moving her phone from her back pocket to the front pouch-pocket of her white hoody with green lettering; 'DC Bullets'. She put both her hands into that spacious pouch and made sure her Samsung was set to silent before switching it on and blindly working her thumbs across the keyboard on it.

'_I'm okay. The plane just landed. Black government SUV picked us up at …' _she began objectively, before leaning back and looking out the black-tinted windows to see if she could spot a sign or something telling her where she was. Her eyes - color-troubled as they were - spotted a dark green sign passing behind them as they pulled onto the freeway.

'**RICHMOND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT'**

Richmond? Richmond, Virginia? What the hell was in Virginia?

Toph continued her text, _'Richmond International Airport, Virginia, and heading North on Highway. Little help would be nice,' _and then added Katara's, Zuko's, Sokka's, Suki's and Aang's numbers to the recipients list and tapped the 'send' button. She bit her lip, hoping to God they answered her text soon - she was going nuts trying to figure shit out on her own. She'd been taken hostage, more or less, and now she was on the other side of the country, left to figure shit out on her own. Mathematically, she was a genius, but thinking outside the box was Aang's area of expertise, and thinking under pressure was Zuko's, and thinking strategically was Sokka's.

Her friends were her best chance of figuring out what was going on.

* * *

><p>At lunchtime, when they were all allowed to go outside, they were finally able to get reception again, and they were all blessed - bar for Katara, because she was an extremely nice person sort-of like a girl Robin Hood - with Toph's text. It was very Toph-y, as Sokka had put it, and assured them that she was alive and well and not traumatized to the point of no longer being herself, at least. It wasn't much, but it was a start. This time, Sokka, Suki, Aang and Katara were sitting around waiting for Zuko, whose turn it was to get lunch for all of them.<p>

Sitting on the park bench on the edge of the school grounds, they waited for Zuko, all of them with feet tapping on the floor nervously. They guessed Zuko hadn't gotten the text yet, being still inside without cell signal. Toph was in Virginia. Why was anyone's guess, but how, they now knew.

When Zuko finally turned up, it happened that his phone was out of battery charge due to having been on the phone to his sister, who apparently knew something about the fight earlier. When they asked who'd been fighting, he said it wasn't important and asked if any news had come in on the Toph front.

"Toph's in Virginia," Katara answered simply, her eyes narrowed and her tone serious.

Zuko nearly choked as he tossed wrapped sandwiches to the others. "McLean, Virginia?" he asked quickly, standing straight and paling, despite his own voice control. McLean, Virginia was home to the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters - if Toph was there, she was fucked. Hell, they could _all _be fucked if she was there. "Please tell me she's not there," he added quite seriously, eyes settled on Sokka, whose brows were down.

"Richmond," Sokka corrected his friend, and for a moment, Zuko's shoulders drooped in relief, before he continued. "But they're headed north. Is McLean north of Richmond?"

Zuko looked up from his hands, which were unwrapping his sandwich. "North-north-west," his lips thinned against one another and his golden eyes fell on Katara's blue ones - Toph was either in trouble for her hacking, or for sending Katara into JCI - most likely the latter. "This is bad," he told her seriously.

"Why?" Aang asked suddenly, his voice filled with panic and concern. "What's in McLean?" he jumped to his feet, his lunch clasped in a tense fist - he wouldn't have been able to eat it anyway. He was too nervous.

Katara sat up a little straighter as Zuko sighed.

"The Central Intelligence Agency."

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Oh, my fucking, god. Writers block abounding. Fuck. ME. Argh. Part of it is writers block, part of it is my stupid plan for what I'm calling 'the best plan ever in the history of stupid teenagers doing stupid things'. I'm not an irresponsible kid, okay? I don't do shit like this. Especially not without my mom's permission. I have never ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER done something as STUPID as this. It does not involve sex. Or drugs. Or crazy feats of heroism. If I actually manage to do it (if I get the money together for it) I'll tell you guys all about it. It's going to be epic. I hope. SHIT. Anyway, I've had to look up train times and shit like that to make sure I can actually do it, and I've spent SO much time just desperately trying to earn money for it. So far I have _£13_. OMFG how rich am I?**

**ANYWAY. I am a bitch. I told myself after the last chapter I was going to update WAY more frequently and I was gonna get back on it, but I hate myself for not being able to do that, and I've been afraid to work on it because it's like, 'ugh it's gonna be so late, what's even the point?' But alas. I keep trudging on. next chapter is IN MY HEAD. I swear it. And Zutara will BEGIN! Hopefully realistically, too. I've said it before; the cure to writer's block is often a good dose of Zutara.**

**And a great scene from LILABOC has made itself apparent in my mind. Hopefully you guys will remember it …**

**(Fixed - mistake. Last scene Suki's name was put down instead of Katara's. Thanks to Silv3rL0v3 for pointing it out!)  
><strong>

* * *

><p>Kelly smiled. "Your mom was a psychiatrist to the end; she knew talking about things made it better. I guess that's why she was such a … happy person." She sighed reminiscently. "Always with the 'Are you okay? Want to talk about it?' questions … nosy pain in the ass." She laughed under her breath.<p>

Katara smiled too. "I'll give you that. Nosy." She nodded. "She was lots of things, but nosy is the first word the comes to mind."

"And the second?" Kelly proceeded to unpack the groceries onto the counter.

Katara grinned. "Food."

Kelly laughed again. "Food indeed."

* * *

><p><strong>I know it's not much. It's really not much. I'm just exhausted. Revyoo? :3 xx<br>**


	13. An Eye For An Eye

"Gah!" Toph sputtered, falling into the seat (she assumed that's what it was), and struggling against the handcuffs secured on her wrists and the blindfold secured around her head, squashing her black hair against her skull. "Get these things off me before I break my foot off in one'a your asses!" she threatened boldly, kicking her legs out wildly to find them kicking away across the floor what sounded like a steel table that clattered against a wall and fell on its side.

Trained, serious hands held her down in the chair and fixed her arms so they were wrapped around the back of the chair. She continued to kick out at them, catching one of them in the stomach and sending them across the room, stumbling, blind as she was with her blindfold on. One of them grabbed an ankle and tugged off their tie to secure it to the leg of her chair. She tried again to kick, but she completely tugged the leg of the chair out from under her and the chair went falling backward. The back of the chair clattered against the floor hollowly before she was lying on her back in a sitting position, momentarily stunned.

Grinding her teeth and taking a controlled breath, Toph pulled her lips together in a taut frown. "Get me off this floor," she ordered calmly, her fight seeming to leave her as she thrashed her head away from the light peeking through under the blindfold - it was bright, fluorescent lighting, and she'd been handcuffed and blindfolded into the black since about ten minutes into the drive up to wherever she was now.

Her chair was set right by what she sensed as two people - in suits, she guessed. All of them were suits. She expected her father had _fucked _off by now, never one to hang around to see what was actually going to happen. Coward. She heard another chair being pulled up to her and someone telling some other people to leave. Then the door made a clicking noise and she was sure she was alone for a moment.

"Toph Bei Fong - otherwise known as The Blind Bandit," a man's voice filled her ears, as she heard paper unfolding. She became aware he was reading a report someone had done on her. "Born April 29th, a Taurus, of 1995. That makes you only just fifteen, am I correct?" the man's low, east-coast accent became lodged in her mind as she tried to figure out what he wanted from her.

With an indignant grunt, Toph snapped harshly, directly at him, beginning to become used to the blindness of the blindfold, and better able to maneuver it. "How do you know I'm the Blind Bandit?" she questioned seriously, brows down under her blindfold, the corners of her mouth set downward. "Who are you? Where am I?" she demanded answers, her free foot stamping at the floor beneath her.

"You're at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in McLean, Virginia. My name is Agent Maxwell," he explained quite simply and honestly, as if he had nothing to hide, and as if there was no danger in telling her this. "I've been working your case since the JCI infiltration."

Toph swallowed immediately, finding her throat going dry. Her case? She had a case? The CIA was working a case on her? She wondered why, only for a tiny moment, and then it hit her like a slap in the face. The hacking. She'd gone and gotten herself caught with that stupid stunt at JCI and now she was at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in the ass-end of nowhere, in handcuffs, ready to be prosecuted for it. Damn it. _Damn it!_

Noticing how Toph froze in realization, Maxwell - she was going to call him that, even if he was just bullshitting her about what his name was - gave a curt, humorless laugh and then flipped a page on the report he was reading. "You've got a better resume than most of the guys that work here," he pointed out without a single tinge of jealousy or anything … _at all … _in his voice. "And," he began with a small tone in his voice that she recognized as the sound of a smirk.

"And?" Toph murmured coldly.

"And you're connected to the Painted Lady."

Toph grumbled something into the air between them and then tersely snapped at the agent. "So?" she spat, volatile hostility in her voice.

"So we might be able to come to an arrangement," he sneered pensively, and Toph heard the sound of his chair scraping on the floor as he moved it closer to her.

Toph's eyes widened beneath her blindfold for a moment, before she narrowed them again and sat straighter. She would never sell Katara out like that - not after Katara's display of loyalty at JCI. Not after what she'd done to keep Toph safe. No. No, she couldn't sell out a friend like that. She'd rather have died. "No deal, asshole," she bit solemnly, "I'm not selling my friend out. Go ahead and throw me in prison for all I care," she tossed her head defiantly to one side, so she was blindly looking away from him.

"We figured that's what you would say," she heard writing on paper. "If that had been what we wanted."

Toph rolled her eyes, sick of all this slow, pacing cryptic bullshit. "Cut the crap, Jack - what exactly _do_ you guys want from me?" she would've moved to tear off her blindfold at this point, but it wasn't an option. Instead she drew in a steady breath and then sighed, exhausted from jetlag and more.

"We'd like to recruit the Painted Lady and the Blue Spirit for a little task. And then you're all free to go. To do whatever you want."

Toph frowned seriously and ran her tongue across her lower lip. "Why don't you want them in prison?" she wondered aloud.

The agent chuckled. "If people are watching the news for stories of super-heroic acts and petty thefts, they're not watching for corrupt senators and whore-mongering congressmen. If reporters are looking to get a story people will care about, they'll go for 'the Blue Spirit saves again' or 'the Painted Lady's comeback' over 'where the money for the Mayor's new car came from'. This country don't stand to gain anythin' from the disappearance of Dahlia Coast's insignificant _mascots_."

Toph ground her top teeth hard against her bottom ones and struggled to keep herself from becoming insulted and indignant. "What kind of _task_?" she asked into her solitary darkness.

There was a long pause and she sensed him standing up.

"Contact the Painted Lady and tell her to have the Blue Spirit at the payphone on Main Street, downtown Dahlia Coast, outside of that ice cream parlor, 'Vinny's', at nine tonight. We'll call them. You get us their help, and once the task is done, you get to go home with your oh-so-loyal daddy," he sneered in a cruel, teasing tone that made her want to spit on him.

Toph thrashed to get at the voice in the darkness, but he was already gone. Then some agents came and undid one of her hands from the handcuffs, took off her blindfold and put her phone on the metal table in front of her before leaving her to make the call. With a grimace, Toph leant back and blew air at the ceiling, lifting her left hand, which had been freed, and pushing her bangs from her face for a split moment.

She wondered if this was more trouble than freedom was worth, and then dropped her head and stared at her phone on the table.

* * *

><p>Katara walked into Toph's bedroom office, where Suki was sat at the computer with Sokka and Zuko standing around and looking at the computer screen over her shoulder. The Marina girl expertly carried four cups of coffee - two in each hand - for her sleepless friends. Aang was sat downstairs, after a long argument with the others - which had ended in tears - over whether or not he should be allowed a presence in the room where they worked on helping Toph.<p>

Sokka turned first to see Katara. "Hey. How's Aang doing?" he asked in concern, the blue of his eyes sparkling and the whites of them reddened by fatigue, taking one of the cups Katara offered. He took a sip of the strong beverage and grimaced at its strength. He took it Katara had made them all particularly strong, guessing everyone was as tired as her. He wondered if Katara had other worries on her mind - now wouldn't be the best time for more worry.

Sokka's sister sighed, extending a cup to Zuko, who took it and drank with barely any notice of its strength - he usually drank his coffee that strong. "Better," she answered solemnly. "I told him to take a nap, but I don't think he's gonna be able to sleep." She remembered Aang's words with a slight, weak frown.

'_How can you go on in life knowing the people you love can just … slip away like that?'_

_How_ indeed, she mused to herself.

"You can say that again," Suki murmured, eyes on the computer screen moving to the cup of coffee Katara set down on the desk for her. She picked it up and took a long guzzle of the steaming drink, but paid no attention to its temperature. She felt like she hadn't slept in weeks. "You're sure Toph's mom won't be home?" she looked over her shoulder to Sokka.

Sokka shook his head. "Toph told me her mom works late every night, except on Sundays."

"Yeah, well she wasn't working late on Toph's birthday," Suki murmured with a scowl.

Sokka grimaced, "She's not going to come here. If karma actually exists, then we're in credit today," he stated plainly and darkly, "things can't get much worse than they already are."

Katara guessed Toph would've smacked Sokka on the back and told him not to tempt fate, as she leant against the wall and took a long sip of coffee. This was all her fault - if she hadn't agreed to go to JCI for Toph, her friend wouldn't be in this mess. Toph had never been caught before then, and se knew it for a fact. She wondered if Toph's paranoia over whether Aang had been cheating on her would've been better spent worrying if the CIA was trying to catch her.

Zuko strolled over, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other - Toph would've told him not to smoke on her expensive carpet. "Tired?" he asked Katara carefully, before taking a sip of coffee between drags of smoke.

Katara pondered this for a moment before deciding she didn't want to answer. "Coffee and cigarettes," she pointed out with a frown, "are a great way to ruin that pearly white smile you have, Zuko. You should consider quitting one of them," she told him with a humorless snort which he suspected she was trying to pass off as a laugh.

Zuko pulled his mouth one way and looked at the cigarette in his hand. "Yeah," he agreed in a poignant tone, "I was thinking of quitting smoking, but …" he trailed off, trying to think of an excuse, and struggling to find one in his head.

"But you need a little help," Katara smiled weakly, before suggesting something. "Do you know Yue Chander?"

Zuko grimaced. "Yeah, I know her," he glanced back to Sokka and Suki from the side of the room where they talked quietly - they were trying to crack one of Toph's encryptions, "She helped Sokka get over the peyote, right?"

Blue eyes looked away. "Yeah. Jet used to ask for her help every time he wanted to quit something. And then he'd start right back up again," she stopped to recognize the look of distaste on Zuko's face and she frowned too. "Why do you look like I just told you to go to an AA meeting?"

Zuko drew his shoulders up and stubbed out his cigarette against the cup in his other hand, catching the ashes in his palm, hot as they were. "I don't really like the girl. I mean, I get that she's helped a lot of people get over their problems and vices, but she always gives me this dirty look in school whenever she catches me smoking. Like it's her freaking _mission from God, _to make everyone stop using drugs, _forever," _he then cleared his throat and shook his head. "I know this guy who doesn't smoke usually, but he can have a cigarette at a party and then not have cravings. I wish I could do it like that, but Jet told me her first rule is _no more, not ever," _he took a sip of coffee and then exhaled the warmth of it. "And you know what happens when someone tells you not to do something."

Katara gave a tiny smile - possibly her first that day. She couldn't remember smiling at all that day. "Makes you want to do it even more."

Zuko then shrugged nervously. "It feels like if I went to her to help me, it would be like saying 'okay you were right to give me all those dirty looks, I'll just come crawling over to you for help and grovel just a little bit. Here, want me to nuzzle your shoes?'-,"

Katara found herself laughing at the very idea of him nuzzling anyone's shoes - the proud man that he was would never stoop like that. "Okay, okay, I get it," she chuckled, and reached out to pat him on the arm, before taking the cigarette from his hand and looking at it for a moment. She brought it to her nose and gave it a sniff. She was kind of used to the smell, always having been so close to Zuko, but she did _notice _that it wasn't a particularly pleasant smell. She remembered that Zuko always smelled the best when he wasn't stressed - because he didn't smoke when he wasn't stressed. He smelt of sandalwood and incense, and that nice washing powder Consuela used.

"But that's not to say I don't want any help," Zuko interjected defensively. "I just don't want to go crawling to-,"

"Alright, then _I'll_ help you. For now we'll just say, you won't have a cigarette … _today," _Katara suggested calmly, with a smile, gesturing with the cigarette in her hand and then slipping it into her pocket, where her phone should've been, if not for her inherent niceness. "Right?" she tilted her head amicably.

Zuko paused for a moment and then gave a tiny, warm smile. "Right," he agreed, still smiling, golden eyes on blue ones.

* * *

><p>In a darkened classroom, at 4:32pm, a clock ticked calmly. The lights on the ceiling were off, a few pencils sat on the desks, beneath the chairs over them, where people had forgotten to pick them up. The chairs were all turned up-side-down, on top of the desks, and the light of the graying sky outside shone through the windows in hazy blurs of white light, different to the crisp, pouring way that the lights on that ceiling supplied light in the daytime.<p>

On a larger desk in the middle of the front of the classroom, there was a stack of papers, a cup of pencils, a few expensive pens and some random, confiscated objects. And on the left side of the desk - the left hand side of the desk furthest from all the other stuff - in the middle of the left hand side of the desk, was a phone.

That phone lay on its back, its screen to the ceiling with the dead, inactive lights, alone and separated from its owner because of her inherent niceness. Then in the gray, darkened classroom, the phone began to scream out enthusiastically. _**'FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHATCHA TELL ME! FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHATCHA TELL ME! FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHATCHA TELL ME!' **_and it continued to scream out to be answered, alongside a guitar riff of confident enthusiasm, but no-one was in the room, or even in the building, to answer it.

* * *

><p>"Come on, Sugarqueen, answer your damn phone!" Toph cursed darkly under her breath, her hand and her phone dropping into her denim-clad lap and her head becoming hung. She knew she was going to end up in prison, whether or not they extorted Katara and Zuko first. They were sneaky sons of bitches, that much she could tell. Lifting her head, Toph looked around the room. It was white-painted, and the floor was linoleum, in gray.<p>

There was a window-shaped mirror at one end of the room that Toph decided was probably a one-way window so they could keep an eye on her. She guessed they were probably listening in too. Good thing she called Katara by her nickname instead of by her real name, she mused. _'Okay, Toph, think. What would Aang say?' _she thought to herself seriously.

'_Toph, you need to calm down - all this stressing yourself is never going to help __**anything!' **_she imagined him saying in her head.

She shook her head - no matter how calm she was, she wouldn't break out of this with serenity. That was for shit sure.

Okay. Where would Katara be with now? Knowing her, she'd probably be with Aang, calming him down. And Aang would be … with everyone else. So where would her friends be right now? Shit, this was just fucking pointless - she grabbed up her phone again and scrolled through her phone book, tapped the screen and then brought the phone to her ear to hear it ringing.

* * *

><p>"Oh shit!" Zuko jumped, suddenly putting his dripping coffee cup down and grabbing either side of his head, eyes fixed on the carpet at his feet. His fingers slipped through his hair and the corners of his mouth dove down on his face, teeth clenched in a panicky grimace. Toph was going to kill him, he declared in his head at the sight of the huge coffee stain on her expensive, creamy carpet.<p>

He hadn't even realized the way his cup had been tilting in his hand as he daydreamed. He may have even fallen asleep against the wall he had been leaning against, but even now he couldn't say for sure. Katara jumped at the way he did, and Sokka raced over too as if wondering if Zuko had just killed someone. Suki stayed fixed on the computer, possibly not even aware that Zuko had made a noise.

Aang, Zuko heard, had leapt to his feet at the sound. "What's wrong?" the younger boy yelped from downstairs.

Zuko answered as calmly as he could. "Er … uh, nothing!" he tried, obviously not very convincingly, because then he heard Aang thundering up the stairs.

The younger boy burst into the room, nearly crashing into Katara as she put her own coffee down to run downstairs for a cloth to scrub at the coffee stain. Aang looked to the stain and then to Zuko, and then back to the stain, and then his eyes widened and his grimaced. "Oh, _shit. _Toph's going to-," but Aang was cut off as Katara ran out of the room and raced downstairs.

Sokka suddenly interjected at a shout. "No she's not!" he grabbed the heavy, white leather armchair by the wall, just a foot or two away from the stain. He dragged it across the carpet until it was stationed right over it. The stain didn't even stick out from underneath. _'Sokka Marina, master of deception' _he thought to himself with a grin.

"She's going to notice, Sokka!" Aang yelled at Sokka, approaching the chair and grabbing it to push it away from the stain so they could at least _try _to wipe at it. "You know how she is!"

Sokka's arms flailed out and he grabbed the other arm of the chair and pushed it in the opposite direction from the way Aang was pushing. "No, Aang! Just-,"

"Sokka!"

"Aang!"

"I said-,"

"Toph's not gonna-,"

Zuko watched as the two tugged the chair back and forth, wondering if they were going to make a bigger mess by tearing the chair in half, but he only put a hand over his eyes and grumbled miserably. Stupid Sokka and his stupid tempting fate with his stupid 'couldn't get much worse' motto …

Katara exploded into the room with an armful of cloths, ready to wipe the coffee stain up - her mother had always told her the sooner you cleaned up a mess, the easier it was to clean - and she tossed a few Zuko's way, saying something about helping as she did so. Zuko caught them and immediately joined Aang in the effort to push the chair in Sokka's direction. Sokka fell backwards and crossed his arms, pouting. Aang, Zuko and Katara wiped at the stain desperately.

'_**Spider pig! Spider pig! Does whatever a Spider-Pig does! Can he swing, from a web? No, he can't, he's a pig …'**_

Everyone froze and sat up straight, turning in Sokka's direction. The Marina boy struggled to sit up, grabbing his phone from his pocket and answering immediately. He thought to himself - in a darkened corner of his mind far from the importance of the situation at hand - that it would be pretty awkward if he answered this eagerly and then it turned out to be someone like Jet, just trying to waste his fucking time. "Hello?" Sokka heard his voice crack and yelp at the same time.

"_Atleast __**someone**__ answers their fucking phone!" _Toph screamed into his ear, quite obviously irate.

Sokka breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Yep. That was Toph, all right. "You have no idea how good your voice sounds right now, Toph."

Toph breathed out slowly. _"I can guess. I take it you guys figured out where these sons' a bitches took me, right?"_

"Yeah," Sokka replied, glancing sideways to Suki. "Zuko cracked that one. McLean, Virginia - CIA headquarters," Sokka ceded carefully, "Right?"

With a stifled yawn, Toph answered hesitantly, _"Right. Is The Painted Lady with you?"_

Sokka frowned immediately. Why would Toph use Katara's pseudonym instead of her actual name? Why not just 'Sugarqueen', even? Then it hit him - she wasn't sure if there were eavesdroppers near her, and she was trying to protect Katara, the way Katara had protected her at JCI. "Say 'just put her on already' if you think you're being listened in on, Toph."

Toph sounded relieved at this, paranoid as she was. _"Just put her on already."_

Sokka nodded, almost as if Toph were right in front of him. "Got it. I'm putting her on now," he clambered to his feet and then extended the phone to his sister, eyes meeting hers. "She's not alone. Be careful," he told Katara in a serious, low tone, as she took the LG from him, watching him nervously. He clapped a hand on her shoulder supportively.

Katara brought the phone to her ear. "Toph," she stated shakily.

"_I need your help," _Toph's voice came out in a careful tone that Katara had never heard on Toph before. Toph would never have said something like that. _"You and Blue need to be at the payphone outside Vinny's at nine tonight. Can you do that for me?"_

"Got it. Are you okay?"

Toph chuckled humorlessly. _"Yeah, no, I'm used to being handcuffed," _she joked sarcastically, _"Happens all the time, y'know. Put Baldy on the phone, will you?" _she cleared her throat and did what sounded like _spitting. _Katara grimaced and without a word, handed the phone to Aang, who snatched it up like Golem would a Ring.

Aang sputtered for a few moments before he was able to put words together and speak. "Toph?" was all he was able to get out.

"_Hey. 'Sup?"_

Aang gave an involuntary laugh, marveling at how casual she could be in such a situation. "Uh … the sky?" he tried helplessly, his mind running rings like those around Saturn.

Toph laughed too - it sounded like music to him. _"Really? I hadn't noticed. Thought it was … y'know, more to the left."_

"You're something, you know that?" Aang found himself saying, without really thinking about it.

Toph sounded like she was grinning. _"So you keep telling me. Beginning to wonder whether you're just sucking up or if I'm really just that fucking spectacular in the sack."_

Aang opened his mouth to say more, but no words would come.

It was okay, Toph wanted to speak anyway. _"Don't worry, 'kay? I'll be back just as soon as our good buddies do the CIA a favor. Just hang in there, don't freak out, take your own advice and just __**calm the fuck down, **__got it?" _she ordered him affectionately.

"Got it, Toph."

"_Okay," _the blind bandit sounded a little reluctant to hang up. _"Love you," _she told him in a tiny voice.

Aang breathed a heavy sigh. "Love you too," he replied warmly.

"_Bye."_

"… Bye."

And then the line was dead.

* * *

><p>Katherine Roberts examined the results of her study with narrowed eyes. The machines couldn't <em>still <em>be malfunctioning … and there was no way that this phenomena could have coincidentally repeated itself. Her theory had to be correct. But this made no sense - one of these genes had been found in _rodents! _A long lost gene in humans, also found in rodents, would've been noticed _years _ago. Had to have been.

Ah. But not just _any _rodents, were they? No.

Katherine pinned her fourth results sheet up in line with the other three on the bulletin board on her lab wall. Four. One of which had been found in what little DNA was left on an old fossil of what had looked like a sky serpent - a _dragon, _she remembered the archaeologists comparing it to, with its reptilian head and hard outer scales. It had come remarkably close to the old, ancient Dragons of Chinese legends. It had been huge, she recalled, the length of her car, and she drove a Lincoln. The second of these four had been found in a live, natural-hybrid badger-mole. Professors now studying it were calling it a fluke of nature, but Katherine was now presuming it was more likely a fluke that it had taken so long to find it.

That badger-mole had been as long as her arm, and the report afterwards had put it at only around six weeks old. It was that big, and only a baby. It could have grown to fifteen feet tall at full adulthood, she told herself seriously. This was dangerous stuff she was looking into, she declared in her mind.

"Mummy, can we go? I'm starting to get a headache," Lydia spoke tiredly from her side of the room - she'd been sat, waiting for nearly two hours now. Katherine supposed she'd ought to take Lydia home. She supposed she should get some rest too - she was expected to give a speech on her findings tomorrow, and she had to outright lie about them to be sure nobody knew about these four strange genes, all on the same allele.

It was impossible to tell who was carrying one of these genes. It frustrated and worried Katherine.

* * *

><p>The Painted Lady and Blue Spirit didn't go as The Painted Lady and Blue Spirit to that payphone, but that was not to say they went as Katara and Zuko either. They went in two pairs of Katara's thick dark sunglasses, two of Zuko's hooded gray sweatshirts, baggy jeans, sneakers and scarves over the lower halves of their faces. If all went well, they couldn't be identified - at least not positively.<p>

Zuko paid some old guy to go into Vinny's to get him a waxed-paper cup of vanilla milkshake and a bottle of coke, and he made his own makeshift ice-cream soda out on the street, before giving the rest of his coke to Katara, as they waited for the phone to ring. The two had spent the hours between Toph's phone call and the payphone running a brief surveillance on Aidan, accidentally catching Lydia and her mother walking out of the tallest building in the city, where that Fortune 500 company, Cures USA, did their research, and seeing Jet hanging at the park with Haru, smoking a couple of joints.

Katara poured some coke into her mouth and then took a sigh. "What do you think they want from us?" she asked quietly and seriously, almost under her breath.

"I don't know," Zuko replied darkly, before taking a slurp from his makeshift ice-cream soda, "Whatever they want, it's not going to be in our favor - I can tell you that much."

The blue-eyed girl pulled her mouth one way in an agitated frown, leaning against the phone booth. "They're obviously not fucking around either. These are serious people." She glanced up the street when she thought she caught a glimmer of something, but then she returned to looking over her shoulder through the plastic glass of the phone booth.

Zuko grimaced, but didn't reply. She was right - they were serious fucking people and he could tell they weren't going to take any kind of rejection lightly. If they refused whatever they wanted, Toph could land her ass in jail. Permanently. Hell, they could frame her for murder if they wanted - the government had always proven unscrupulous in the past. Sure, they got the job done in the long run, but he wasn't so sure if they were to protect and help the people, or if they were to protect and help the politicians.

The phone suddenly gave a hollow, old-fashioned ringing and the two teens exchanged glances through their sunglasses. Katara gave an assuring nod, and he returned it. Both approached the payphone and stepped in, glancing off in several directions to see if the CIA were watching them via security cameras. He plucked the phone from its cradle and put it to his ear, silencing the ringing of it. "Guess who?" he seethed, humorlessly and dryly.

There was a short silence that faded into someone laughing, self-impressed and jovial. _"Nice to meet you too, Blue," _the voice on the other end was deep and not too clear, almost like the man - Zuko was sure it was a man, no woman could ever sound like that - was gargling marbles. _"I take it your lady friend is with you?"_

Zuko glanced to Katara and felt a surge of protectivity hit him, but he replied just the same. "She's with me. What do you want in exchange for the Blind Bandit?" he turned in the phone booth so he was facing Katara, the receiver pressed to his ear. Katara was watching him with narrowed eyes - he couldn't see them through the sunglasses, but he could tell nonetheless.

This time there was no laughter; no emotion at all. The voice was as cold and serious and threatening as an oncoming train when your foot is stuck in the tracks. Ominously, the man spoke with the deliberation of a revenge killer. _"We want Alain Baptiste - do you know who he is?" _the voice cooed as if they were talking to a child. In many ways, Zuko supposed he was. For seventeen, he sure got himself into a lot of shit, he mused.

Zuko thought for a moment until it dawned on him - Alain Baptiste was a French reporter for The Dahlia Coast Daily. There were some rumors that he had been offered a job in New York with the New York Times. Baptiste had run one story - of tremendous accuracy - on the Painted Lady's injury a few weeks ago. Most of the other local reporters had run five or six on the Painted Lady or Blue Spirit. Baptiste, Zuko remembered, always ran the kind of stories his father read, rather than what was going on with the Blue Spirit and the Painted Lady.

'_Corruption in Dahlia Coast Congress!'_

'_Voting Polls Influenced by biased College lectures?'_

'_Bill for Death Sentence in DC voted against!'_

Zuko ran his tongue over his lower lip and nodded as if the man on the other end could see him - for all he knew, he could have - and answered. "Yeah, I know who he is. Why do you need us to catch him for you?" he cleared his throat and adjusted his hood to provide better cover for him. He knew the CIA had resources they could go to - if they wanted someone caught for them, why not just go to someone else they had dirt on?

That serious tone came again. _"Our people are allowed to arrest and interrogate, but not … __**silence**__, if you catch my drift," _the voice gave a brief chuckle as the horrifying reality of the situation dawned on Zuko and his fingers gripped the phone a little tighter. Katara watched as his knuckles turned white, and he stuffed his free hand into his pocket to hide his trembling fingers from her. What were they talking about? Zuko swallowed hard and listened carefully. _"Dead men tell no tales."_

Zuko opened his mouth to speak, to protest, to say something, but no words came to his mind. He wouldn't have been able to say any if they had.

"_If our problem is solved by midnight on Monday, the Blind Bandit returns to Dahlia Coast without a scratch. For every hour after that that the man is alive, the Blind Bandit will lose a finger. When we run out of digits, we'll move to limbs. Have I made myself clear?" _the voice sneered darkly and seriously, and it gave a satisfied grunt that made Zuko sick.

Zuko hesitated and felt his throat dry. These were serious fucking people. They would cut off a fifteen-year-old girl's fingers without a second thought, and they wanted an innocent man dead for no apparent reason, and they would send someone like him - he suddenly felt very young and afraid - to _finish the job. _

He wanted to throw up. Fuck, he wanted to rip his fucking stomach out to get rid of the churning it was doing in his gut. They wanted someone - he didn't suppose they cared just _who _- to kill this man, and Zuko would be damned if he let Katara do it. Suddenly he was being ordered to take a man's life. He had never even _contemplated _it. Had he made himself fucking clear? No? Yes? Maybe? Zuko felt his own mind running rings around his head, his imagination stretched further than he'd ever stretched it before.

But the Blue Spirit answered in a low, terrified, raspy whisper. "Yes."

"_Good."_

The line was silenced and Zuko stood there for a moment with the receiver in his hand, pressed to his ear as if waiting for someone to say 'only joking' or something. Someone to come and tell him the horrifying, sickeningly _red _images flashing in his head would never come true. No sound came from it.

He shut his golden eyes, and he clenched his teeth. He grabbed his sunglasses and tore them off his face quite viciously, baring his teeth in frustration. He turned swiftly and brought the receiver crashing down into its cradle as if trying to smash it into a million pieces. Zuko tugged his other hand out of his pocket and brought it crashing flat on the plastic glass of the booth, his back turned to Katara. He hung his head and drew a shaky breath; his head hung down and his brow furrowed.

"Zuko?" Katara asked carefully, quieter that she should have been. Zuko realized she'd taken a few steps back at his display of frustration. "What's wrong?"

Zuko's hands slid down to his sides and he sighed heavily. He wondered if he should tell her - if he should tell her they were going to kill a man. He supposed he would have to - he couldn't ask her to help him break into a man's home and then make her watch him slash open … he suddenly felt the urge to puke again, and he wished he were dead, for a moment. He reached up with one hand and slipped his fingers into his hair, turning slowly to face her. She watched him with huge blue eyes, her sunglasses in a hand trembling at her side. He wondered if she were as scared as he was.

"Is Toph okay?" she asked carefully.

Zuko nodded lethargically without meeting her eyes, tucking one hand into his pocket and scratching at his scalp as if trying to free his mind of the prior conversation. "Toph's fine," he answered truthfully, taking a long blink, still trying to catch his own mind from spinning him in circles.

Katara swallowed hard and watched him warily. "A-are you okay?"

The golden-eyed boy sighed. "… No."

With a tiny breath, Katara stepped closer and looked up at him, forcing him to meet her eyes. "What did they say?" she whispered breathily, eyebrows tilted up and lips parted in concern. He wondered how she would take it. Zuko scavenged his mind for the right words to tell her; for the right context, for the right tact. He had never really been very tactful, and he cursed himself for it now. "What do they want?" she added a little nervously.

Zuko drew in another shaky breath and unwound his hand from his hair under the hood, giving a sigh. "They want … Alain Baptiste. The reporter."

Katara drew her head back and then tilted it suspiciously. Why was he acting so freaked out if they just- and then her eyes widened. Her hand raced up to her mouth, so fast the inside of her lip was cut between her teeth. She searched his eyes, looking for something, though she was unsure exactly what. "You mean … ?" she trailed off on a whispery breath, unable to complete her question.

He grimaced, and he felt the cool beginnings of rain on his face. "… Yeah."

No More Secrets.

* * *

><p>Suki and Sokka could hear Aang's light footsteps pacing upstairs as they waited in the kitchen of the bald boy's home. Things weren't okay here, and things weren't okay upstairs, and they weren't okay in Virginia, and they guessed things were a lot less okay on the corner of Main Street, out by Vinny's. If they'd called to ask, they'd have been right. Suki was making breakfast - albeit a little late, but tomato-tomahto - of bacon and eggs for her and Sokka, and she'd made a stack of pancakes for Aang, because she knew he was a vegetarian.<p>

Sokka tilted his head to the ceiling and sniffed the aroma of bacon gliding around the room. "Oh, Suki, you know how to make breakfast - that's for sure," he praised her emphatically.

Suki gave a minimal laugh. "So you keep saying," she replied, flipping the sizzling back over in the frying pan. "And this is way past breakfast time. It's more like …"

Sokka finished for her. "Brinner," he gave a snorting kind of laugh that died down into sniggering amusement.

Suki rolled her eyes. She'd never understand what was so funny about a made-up word that didn't mean anything. "You think they're okay?" she asked, looking up, eyes flicking out the window to the cloudy night sky, as a few sparse rain splashes fell sporadically from the sky, hitting the window and disintegrating there, not large enough to even splatter. Suki could tell by the splatters, though, that it was going to come on hard in a few minutes.

Sokka gave a thoughtful grunt and stood up from the kitchen table, his chair scraping on the floor as he pushed it back with his knees. "They're fine. It's Toph I'm worried about," Sokka answered solemnly, blue eyes finding their way out to the dark night sky as the rain fell slightly heavier. Within seconds it was falling like it was January, and from inside he could tell it was probably icy cold. If an Indian Summer was what his dad said it was - a summer that extended into the fall - then they were having an Indian Winter.

Suki screwed up her face and turned the bacon again. "Toph would beat you senseless for saying that."

With a tiny grumble, Sokka sighed, approaching and peeking over her shoulder to the bacon. "It's the truth," he began pensively, "whether or not it warrants an ass-kicking."

Suki shook her head. "She told you herself that she was okay. Things will be all right, as long as Katara and Zuko are able to deliver whatever it is the CIA want from them. And then Toph will be home," she cleared her throat, wondering whether she was simply reassuring Sokka or if se was assuring herself too. "It's just waiting now."

"Yeah, well …" Sokka turned away and walked back to the table to lean against it. "I hate waiting."

Suki guessed bacon would make the wait a little more pleasant for him, and then she cursed herself for giving a shit as to how pleasant things were for him. He was a bastard, after all. He was the son of a bitch who'd fucked Yue Chander behind her back. He was the retarded-ass fuckwit who'd given up on them, and the selfish _dickhead _who'd been fucking her while his sister was alone, at home, like a sitting duck, waiting to be kidnapped. Then again, that wasn't his fault, was it? That was hers.

Suki absently pinched the bridge of her nose. Why did he have to be so confusing?

* * *

><p>It was nearing one in the morning when Zuko drew the spare key from under his Uncle's doormat and snuck into the darkness inside. He knew it was late, but if his Uncle wasn't awake to give him advice, then hopefully Lu Ten would be. Father and son alike seemed to share wisdom and foresight, and Zuko only wished some of it would find its way to him - he often found himself needing some wisdom. Zuko supposed he could have gone home to his mother and sister, but his mother was probably already asleep and Azula … he wasn't so sure what Azula was up to these days.<p>

The door clicked shut with barely a sound and Zuko didn't move to turn on the lights. Somehow, the darkness was comforting - like an all-covering blanket, a shroud of blindness. Ignorance was bliss, he mused darkly in the blackened shadows of the room, just standing and breathing in the herbal smells of his Uncle's home. He called it his Uncle's home, but really, he supposed, it was Lu Ten's too. His cousin had an apartment with his girlfriend, but she was often away and Lu Ten (when Zuko had asked) had told him that it got lonely in the city. Zuko couldn't argue with that.

"**RAAAARGH!"** came a growling, screaming, harsh kind of incoherent threat, and Zuko was so jolted by this that he first felt as if he'd been electrically shocked, and then he jumped away from the sound of the yell. Then something hard and wooden whacked him in the chest and he was indisposed, unable even to think with how painful the blow was. He went sprawling backwards, the back of his knees finding what seemed to be a low piece of wooden furniture by the wall.

Zuko yelped out for help, for his uncle - his initial thought was that a robber had been raiding the place when he'd entered - but it broke off in a kind of scrawny little whimper as he tumbled backwards over the not-so-stationary piece of furniture behind him. His eyes widened in the dark and he grabbed out to stop himself from falling, his fingertips grazing the wood of the archway, not quite fast enough to stop his downward motion. In some corner of his mind he marveled at the impact with which his knees and the furniture had made contact, and then his back hit the floor and he would've been staring up if his eyes hadn't been squeezed shut in pain.

Then light was flooding him, almost as abrasive as the assault prior to it. Zuko was preparing to pull his wallet out and offer it to whoever had attacked him in exchange for peace, but his eyes fluttered open and he saw his cousin standing over him with a horrified expression in his face. The baseball bat in Lu Ten's hand clattered onto the wooden flooring and Lu Ten's horrified expression quickly moved into guilt.

Lu Ten exclaimed something incoherent, clapping a hand to his forehead and staring long and hard at Zuko on the floor. He sputtered for a good ten seconds before making a very tense expression with his hands and then offering a very bewildered Zuko a hand up. The scarred teen grabbed his cousin's hand, both pissed off and confused, and was then being tugged up to his feet, still catching his breath and rubbing at the spot where Lu Ten had whacked him in the chest with the baseball bat.

After the air returned to Zuko's lungs, he grabbed his (much older and taller) cousin by bare shoulders and shoved him against a conveniently nearby wall. "You nearly killed me, you crazy bastard!" he yelled up into Lu Ten's face, breathing hard and fast and seething. If you squinted really hard, you could have seen steam escaping his nostrils as he glared at his Uncle's only son.

Lu Ten reached a hand up and pushed Zuko away, breathing off his own bewilderment. "Dude, you snuck into my house at one in the morning," he pointed out, calm and serene. "How was I supposed to know if you were a serial killer coming in here to coke up and rape my dad's birds?" he gestured halfheartedly to the cage in the corner of the hallway, where Iroh's two parakeets, Yin and Yang, were watching with tilted heads.

Zuko rolled his eyes and brushed himself off. "Alright," he breathed out through his nose. "Point taken. Where's Uncle?"

His question was answered when the lights upstairs were turned on and he could hear remarkably fast footsteps for his uncle's age thundering down the stairs. Iroh was at the bottom of the stairs in a flash, in his bed robe, eyes wide and wary. Then, at the sight of Zuko, and Lu Ten, picking up the baseball bat on the floor, he calmed a little bit. He glanced to his son with an apprehensive glint in his eye.

"Do I _want _to know what happened here?" he sighed tiredly.

Lu Ten flashed his father a nervous smile. "My fault. Sorry, dad."

Iroh lifted a hand and rubbed at his eyes, which moved to Zuko rather suspiciously. "What are you doing here, nephew? It's late!" he pointed out rather emphatically, before his hands went down to tighten the tie-belt of his ankle-length, hotel-quality scarlet bed robe, and he scratched quite curiously at his beard, watching his nephew with an innocent kind of questioning in his expression.

Zuko gave a small cough and licked his lower lip to get at the dry feeling on it - his mouth kept going dry, and it had been doing that since the payphone. "I came for … tea?" he tried helplessly, glancing to Lu Ten for help, hoping to god he knew he was using 'tea' as an analogy for 'advice', or 'wisdom', or whatever the hell they called that sixth-sensical ingenuity they employed.

Iroh seemed to get this immediately, where it took Lu Ten a lot longer to catch on. "Ah," was all he said, and then he led Zuko to the kitchen and put some water into the kettle. Lu Ten followed with a confused, screwed up half-frown half-smile, and sat down at the kitchen table. Aw well, at least there was tea to be had.

As Iroh made tea, Zuko sat down, and Lu Ten cleared his throat rather seriously.

"Hey, kid, I wanted to ask something."

Zuko rolled his eyes at the idea of a Blue Spirit joke - Lu Ten had been making a few of them recently. "Go ahead."

Lu Ten swallowed and sat up a little straighter. "As you know, I'm er, getting married … soon. Right? I told you this-,"

"Yeah, yeah, you told me all this," Zuko nodded, making a hand gesture similar to his nod, signaling his cousin to move on with his question.

Lu Ten took a breath and rubbed his hands together before putting them on the table before him. "I want you …" he began calmly. "… To be my best man."

Zuko stopped short and watched Lu Ten suspiciously. "Seriously?" he questioned, fighting off the smile in his head.

Lu Ten just nodded. "Will you, then?" he asked smoothly.

"Yes!" Zuko answered immediately, and the smile erupted on his face.

Iroh turned and served them tea, a huge smile on his own face.

Zuko was suddenly unsure whether or not he wanted to ruin the mood with talk of murder.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: OMFG! I know it doesn't seem it, but this chapter is up a lot sooner than the others have been. Also, my plan 'The best plan ever in the history of stupid teenagers doing stupid things', is going to go down! My accomplice has enough money for the both of us, as it would seem. So, I'm going on a short two-day vacation on the 16****th**** of October. I've realized I'm typing more quantity, and faster, but the quality … mmmh, not so good.**

**That's why Zutara didn't begin this chapter. We've waited for so long, and I don't wanna ruin it with bad quality writing. So there. Wedding time soon! But first, Zuko's got something to do. :( oh the angst.**

**Poor Zuzu. Aw well. Short Author's note this time so I can get it up before I go out. And also, the Re-views have to stop, because they delay the uploading. So.. Now to upload! REVIEW guys! REVIEW! Should Zuko kill the guy? Should Toph lose some fingers? Should they rescue Toph instead? Will Lu Ten and Taylor get married without a problem, or will there be second thoughts? And what's going on between Ozai and Ursa? **

**All to be revealed in due time! So review!**


	14. Accidents Will Happen

The following day was a Saturday, though it felt nothing of the sort. It was cloudy, humid, intermittently pissing down rain, there was thunder heard every ten to twelve minutes, and the spells of dryness in that day were long enough for you to think it was going to lighten up, run inside to get changed, only to come out and see it pissing down again. The newscasters questioned at the possibility of floods, and only the bravest or poorest of fishermen went out for their catch. The outdoor market stalls in town without awnings were quickly packed away and closed for the day, and most people stayed in.

To Katara, it seemed like Christmas - before the actual holiday, when you went out in the rain to buy presents at six PM, where it was already dark instead of that not-quite-sunset weather that six o' clock held in summer. Katara remembered running out of the rain with Suki the Christmas just passed, to pick up gifts for Jet, Zuko, Sokka, Toph and Aang. They had never been the kind of kids who gave Christmas cards to every kid in every class they had - they were too lazy - but their friends, they bought gifts for. And not the cheap gifts, either.

Katara had wanted to get Zuko a baseball signed by Derek Jeter, or Robinson Cano, since his favorite baseball team was the Yankees, but she hadn't been fast enough to get one on the internet. So instead, she remembered she'd gotten him a new phone, because he'd dropped his old one into the toilet while blowing chunks on Halloween, and somehow flushed it down without even knowing. Dumbass. She frowned - why was she being so harsh on him now?

"Katara?" came the tentative voice of the coffee shop boy, Nathan.

Katara looked up from her musings out the window and gave Nathan a brief smile. "Oh. Hey." She greeted him politely, with a smile that to him looked like warmth, but to her felt like obligation. She reminded herself to stop catering to others, but she supposed it would take years to stop doing that. She sat a little straighter and took a sip from her cappuccino.

Nathan cleared his throat calmly and put his hand on the back of the seat opposite her. "Can I sit down? I'm on break."

Katara gave a silent nod, and he sat opposite her. Suki was running late, so she supposed he could sit for a moment.

Nathan Chambers flashed her a charming smile that failed to charm her, and he put his elbows on the table, one hand drawing from the front pocket of his green apron, two pieces of card-paper. "So, I've got two tickets to the Bullets game tonight. I know it's short notice, but my friend bailed on me and I have a ticket spare. You follow football?" he asked calmly, trying his best to maintain a romantic undertone to the conversation.

Katara gave a weak kind of half-smile, unsure as to whether she wanted to go to any kind of game tonight; right now just keeping Toph alive was beginning to feel like a sick, perverted game of cat-and-mouse, the kind she'd been sure Prescott had been playing when he kidnapped her. "Yeah, I follow the game," she replied mildly. In truth, she did, but she preferred baseball to football most days. It was less physical, easier to play with friends, and not so exciting that you could blink and miss something.

Nathan seemed to spark up at this. "Great. They're playing San Francisco. Pick you up at six?"

Katara was unsure what it was that made her say yes to this guy she hardly knew, especially after the kidnap, and Toph's abduction, and all the complications that seemed to be knotting before her eyes each and every turn and corner. Maybe it was the way his face lit up at the reply that she followed football, or maybe it was just the cuteness of his persistence. Either way, she agreed and told him he could pick her up outside the mall at six, even though as soon as he'd left the table with a happy smile on his face, Katara had cursed herself.

A French reporter was supposed to be dead by tomorrow night if they wanted Toph back unscathed, and she hated cutting things close. She resigned herself to a sigh and a sip of her cappuccino and gazed out the window into the mall again, to that spot where she and the Blue Spirit had made their almost-forgotten, daring escape. She supposed she'd just have to go with Zuko tomorrow night. She wondered if Sokka would've wanted the ticket a lot more than her - Katara's brother adored football; the Bullets in particular.

When the door of the coffee shop opened with the little ringing bell over it, Katara looked and saw Suki with a ragged, exhausted expression on her face. Katara felt guilt wash over her face, scolding herself for dragging Suki out of bed so early in the morning. Then she checked her watch and saw it was ten thirty, and wondered why her friend looked so absolutely exhausted. In fact, Suki looked downright terrible.

Her brother's ex-girlfriend sat down opposite her and gave a weak smile, picturing dropping her head to the table and falling back asleep. Really, she was shattered - she'd been up since 5am, with her head in the toilet puking, and then in the shower to rid her body of the smell of vomit, and then she'd gone on her morning run, despite how horrible she felt. "Morning," she murmured absently to Katara across the table.

Katara lifted her cappuccino and took a small, slurping sip. "You look like you've been through the wars, Suki. Bad seafood?" she questioned, her blue eyes becoming mere orbs of concern, her hand reaching out and pushing some of Suki's hair out of her face, and then checking for a temperature. Suki's forehead was hot and sweaty against the back of her hand. "You're burning up," she pointed out with a look of distaste on her face. "Are you okay?"

Suki gave a weak nod, but then recanted by shaking her head and drawing in an uneven breath. "Shoot me, Katara," she pleaded as her stomach churned uneasily and her breakfast threatened to come up again. She clutched a hand to her stomach, as if that was enough to keep her stomach from churning. It didn't help much. "Put me out of my misery," she sniffled, taking a long, tired breath.

Katara pushed her chair back and got to her feet. She stepped closer to Suki and helped her friend up. "Come on - there's no need for you to be out and about. It's Saturday," she reached and picked the waxed-paper cappuccino cup from the table with one hand, and used the other to support as much of Suki's weight as she could without hindering Suki's mobility.

* * *

><p>Back at home, she let Suki climb into her bed and snuggle up with a hot water bottle clutched to her stomach. Suki lay in the enormous king-size on her back, the water bottle between her bare stomach and her thermal undershirt, over which her hands were held, also taking in the heat from it. Katara approached with a thermometer to take her friend's temperature more accurately - it turned out to be only slightly elevated, at ninety-eight - and then went about checking the glands under Suki's jaw line.<p>

Suki spoke, once Katara was done checking for swollen glands. "What was that?" she asked, referring to Katara's having carefully pressed her fingers into the spots between her jaw and neck, checking for lumps and abnormalities under there. She lifted one hand from under the heavy sheets and pressed them to where Katara had checked, as if she could tell what Katara had been looking for.

Katara sat down on the soft white pelt rug beside her bed, her back against the wall. "I was checking your glands. They swell up if your white blood cell count is above normal." And then she frowned; that wasn't right, was it? It probably wasn't as a _result _of a high white blood cell count; it just probably went that if those glands were swollen then you probably had a high white count on your hands.

Suki nodded her head on the pillow in a lazy kind of loll. "How do you know that?"

The blue-eyed girl reached across the floor and grabbed her stuffed bear from the carpet. "I had tonsillitis when I was twelve."

Suki made a face that said 'oh' to Katara, and then realized her stomach's unsettled feeling was going away. "I think I'm beginning to feel better," she thought aloud, with a yawn, and moved to sit up. "Must have just been a fluke or something," she propped herself up on her elbows, contemplating getting up, but thoroughly enjoying the warmth of Katara's enormous bed.

"Good," Katara sighed absently, tossing Charlie, her teddy bear, up onto the bed and grabbing the floor to get up. "But you're still staying in bed. People don't get sick overnight."

The Kyoshi girl rolled her eyes and dropped back to the warmth of the bed under her, half annoyed and half thankful to stay in the bed. She supposed Katara was right - she'd felt completely fine when she'd gone to sleep last night, and it made no sense at all for her to suddenly feel like a ton of bricks. "This sucks. I could be having rebound sex right now," she complained in irritation.

Katara looked up from her distracted thoughts. "Huh?" she found a grin spreading on her face. Suki had moved on from her brother? Really? When had _that _happened? "Who's your rebound guy?" she asked girlishly, her gossipy side kicking in, as absent as it usually was. She wasn't a big gossip, but when it came to Suki (a good friend), Katara was always interested to hear who, what, when, where and how things were going with her.

Suki lifted a hand and rubbed her forehead tiredly. "That cute guy on the football team. Damon. Damien?" she frowned, asking the invisible wisdom in the room - in silence did the invisible wisdom reply. It refused to speak. "No … Darren?" she murmured thoughtfully.

Katara clapped a hand to her mouth and made a strange kind of noise that you might have expected from a bird, but not from a person. "You're not talking about _Dylan Greco_, are you?" Katara's eyes narrowed into slits as she squinted at her almost-sort-of-might-as-well-be sister. "The Bandits' quarterback?" she strained her words in awe.

Suki gave a snort of a laugh. "Yeah. That's the one."

"Lucky bitch," Katara teased halfheartedly. "You're sure he's not just nailing you to piss on Sokka? The guy is always doing his utmost best to be a dick to him."

Blue-green eyes shut as their owner gave a sort of shrug while lying down. "I don't really care, one way or another. Mediocre sex is better then no sex, I guess. I can put up with an hour of shallow self-promotion for it," Suki tucked her hands under her head and watched the ceiling as if waiting for something.

Katara found herself snickering. "Sounds like he _sucks _in the sack."

Suki gave a laugh of reply. "He kinda does. But a junkie will take bad crack over no crack, right?"

Katara smirked and quirked her eyebrow up smugly. "So you're a sex junkie?"

"Pretty much."

The Painted Lady continued to chuckle for a few moments before catching her breath and sighing. She instantly found herself wanting to tell Suki about her date with the coffee shop guy tonight, but she wondered first if she should. Then again, she supposed it would draw the subject away from what they had heard last night on the phone to the CIA. She'd had to avoid anywhere Aang could have been all morning to be sure she didn't run into him. "So, I've got a date tonight," she cleared her throat.

Suki's eyes widened for a brief second and she turned her head on the pillow to look at Katara. "Really? Zuko finally got the balls to ask you out?" she smiled widely.

Katara frowned weakly. "Uh, no," she gave a nervous laugh. "That guy at the coffee shop invited me to see the Bullets game with him. Nathan."

Her friend was taken aback for a moment, and it showed by the way she stared, but then she said 'oh' and turned back to look to the ceiling. Katara instantly felt like a bit of an ass for not having told Nathan that she was almost-sort-of-well-not-really-because-it's complicated seeing someone and really shouldn't go on a date with anyone, even if things were going bad in that department, because she was essentially and undeniably _involved_ with someone. Even if she wasn't screwing the guy she was involved with.

Then something dawned on Katara. She frowned extremely hard and tentatively asked into the space between her and her friend, "When was the last time you had a period?" she sat straighter and looked to Suki's face in serious concern.

Suki in fact laughed at this. "Katara, I'm not-," and she stopped just as suddenly as Katara had, and then threw herself into a sitting position, staring into the middle distance as if she had just realized she'd left something cooking before going on vacation; you know, like unknowingly left a bun in the oven. When _had _she last had a period? It had been … it had been … oh, fuck, it had been … "_Pregnant_!" she shouted out emphatically, as if she hadn't said anything before it, her face a picture. Then she made a nondescript kind of exclamation and ground her teeth, baring them in horror. No, no, no, no, NO. This was **not **happening. Not to her.

There were plenty of reasons for a person to skip a period or two, right? Had to be. She wasn't very good at fooling herself, she mused darkly. Her hands went up and wound into her hair, her eyes searching the room in terrified shock.

Katara leapt to her feet and held her hands out as if giving out calming rays. "Okay, calm down!" she tried to calm her friend, almost wishing she had the power to pause time. "There's a reasonable explanation for this, right?" she reasoned out tentatively, her eyes darting from Suki's eyes to Suki's stomach, as if she were expecting to see a baby just miraculously _growing. _"It's not necessarily-,"

Suki grabbed the sheets and tore them away from her body, and swung her legs from the bed, discarding the hot water bottle to the pillows. "Katara, I need you to come with me to the drugstore," she told her friend desperately, grabbing her jeans from the floor and stuffing her feet into them, panic quickly spreading through her like the plague, making every muscle in her body tingle and shiver. She grabbed her sneakers from beside where her jeans had been and pulled them on as soon as the jeans were up to her hips. She got to her feet, zipped up her trousers and then lifted her feet one by one to tighten the laces. She looked up and saw Katara staring like a deer in headlights. "Katara, _shoes. _Shoes - on your feet!"

"Right!" Katara jumped, shaking off her panic and grabbing her brown snow boots from the carpet, stuffing her feet into them.

* * *

><p>As if Zuko needed much more to piss him off, he'd gotten home to find his mother in the guest bathroom downstairs, tending to some cuts and scrapes on Azula, who had apparently been involved in the fight at school yesterday. Zuko only had to guess that Stephanie girl had been the other fighter - he'd been informed his sister and the other girl had been butting heads recently, over those damned sorority pledges. As per usual, Ozai was working that Saturday, but although he didn't have to worry about bumping into the old bastard, he was still unsettled.<p>

He couldn't help it.

"I picked a bad week to quit smoking," Zuko spoke to himself, tearing his jacket off and throwing it to his bed once he got into his room. He was already tired, and it was only noon. On a nice California day, the sun would've been at its peak, but instead, dull gray clouds, threatening a storm in the next few days pooled and meshed together in the sky. It made him want to puke, almost as much as the phone call had, yesterday.

Zuko sank down to his bed and put his elbows on his knees. One hand came up and knotted itself into his hair, scratching at his scalp as if somehow attempting to rid his head of the terrible thoughts bumping around in it. How morbid, he wondered in his head, was this twisted situation? A seventeen-year-old kid - and in many senses of the word, he was still a kid; he refused to believe otherwise - being forced to make a decision between killing a man he could only assume was innocent and respectable, and allowing his friend to be tortured and killed. Surely there had to be more options than that. He pleaded deep in his chest for more choices to make themselves known.

He guessed he could haul his ass all the way to Virginia and try to break into a top-secret vault where god-knew-what tests were going on and 20,000 estimated government agents worked, armed to the teeth and devoted to their precious capitalism and false security. Plus, there was always the home-team advantage, as he knew from baseball.

He also supposed he could try to fake Alain Baptiste's death, though he was pretty sure the CIA was smarter than to not do their homework. And then they'd probably be pissed off too, and the last thing Zuko wanted at this point was to piss the government off when, as much as he hated to think it, they were showing mercy right now. Zuko knew for fact that they could be a hell of a lot more persistent if they wanted to be.

"Shit," he heard someone murmur, and then with a bit of distaste, he realized it was himself, mumbling while scratching his head and leaning forward in thought. He wondered if Katara would understand his position - if she could even comprehend it. He grimaced. No, she was probably doing that fake-safety, self-deluding thing she did when she couldn't handle the gravity of a situation. He contemplated then whether she would be able to look at him the same way after knowing he had taken a life.

He found his own face screwing up against his will: into a look of distain and disgust. Katara wanted to kill the men who'd killed her mother, but in the years since the killing, she seemed only to have looked at it from one standpoint. Revenge. She didn't seem to know that something like that would change her. Zuko shook his head. He pondered on how killing an innocent man would change _him. _He pondered on whether or not he'd see the same person in the mirror afterwards.

Zuko stood up in decision, and walked to his walk-in closet. He slid the door open and saw the face of the Blue Spirit staring at him from its place on a nail hammered into the wall. Zuko remembered how many times he'd smashed his thumb with that fucking hammer while putting that fucking nail into the wall. Only afterwards had his sister come along to tell him he should have put it on one of the side walls - because the back wall was to the outside of the house, and therefore a lot thicker and denser than the side walls.

'_I'm just saying your job could've been a lot easier, Zuzu.'_

He shook this thought away and grabbed the mask off the wall, looking down at it in his hands. The wood was dry in his hands, and the texture was familiar on his fingertips after all the nights of wearing the Blue Spirit mask to leap across the skyline. Katara didn't need to see him kill Alain Baptiste. He would tell her afterwards, of course - No More Secrets - but he saw no reason for her to be there when he was faced with that final slash. She would just make it harder to give up that piece of him, in being there.

It was decided. Tonight he would trade Alain Baptiste's life for Toph Bei Fong's; and Katara wouldn't be there to stop him.

* * *

><p>Katara sat at the foot of her bed, watching her adoptive sister alternate between pacing and talking to herself. She'd expected Suki's feet to get tired ages ago, but she kept on walking and mumbling and hugging herself tight around the middle, as if she'd only just begun to walk. Katara remembered Suki having been out of breath after running up a stairwell at school, and now attributed it to the results of the clear-blue pregnancy test sat on the vanity ahead of the foot of the bed. The older girl was pacing between where Katara was sat and the vanity.<p>

Katara finally decided it was time she said something - Suki would spend all day walking back and forth if it stayed like this. "Do you … want to talk about options?" she offered carefully, trying her best to be subtle and sensitive, but essentially just needing to get to the point.

Suki turned to eye Katara for a moment and then the waterworks broke loose. Suki sank to the carpet onto her knees and let her hands fall into her lap, hanging her head and sobbing into the space between her and the younger girl. Katara guessed hormones like that had to be pretty strong, and pretty annoying too. "Oh, Katara …" Suki began between sobbing inhales, "what am I gonna do? I can't do this on my own, I'm just one person …" she ranted between crying spells, tears spilling down her reddened cheeks and her pink lips trembling.

Katara slid down from her spot on the bed to her knees, crawled over to Suki and threw her arms around the older girl. She allowed Suki to bury her face into the crook between her shoulder and neck, not knowing what she could say to help her friend. Even if she couldn't find the words to help Suki, she was going to do her best to comfort her. In the back of her mind, she guessed Suki didn't believe in abortion.

'_Auntie Katara,' _she heard a small voice in the caverns of her head. It didn't sound thrilled, or horrified either for that matter.

Oh hell, did they even know for sure that Sokka was the father? Katara decided not to take the conversation down that road; Suki was already terrified and things would only be worse if she began asking the technical questions and prodding at the possible dramas involved in this. "Suki," Katara tried helplessly, putting a hand to the back of Suki's head, her thumb brushing over the auburn locks under it. "You're not going to have to do anything on your own," she promised tentatively.

When Suki started crying even harder, Katara thought she'd said something wrong, never having encountered someone crying for a kindness, but she continued to hold her sister until the tears died away and Suki lay asleep against her shoulder with tanned arms around her. Once Suki was asleep, Katara considered getting up and away from the girl and laying her on the soft carpet with a blanket and pillow to sleep for a while, but when she tried, she discovered a hand clenched on her shirt, unwilling to let her go.

So Katara stayed.

* * *

><p>An older man stood at the podium at the head of the hall, applauding the previous speaker along with the audience, all in their elegant outfits, sitting at round tables with champagne glasses in hand. "Wonderful. And now, 2007 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Katherine Roberts will share with us her findings on the Badger-Mole hybrid found in the Chinese province of Gansu," he announced, holding his hands out to his left to present the well-dressed female scientist approaching the podium.<p>

He stepped back and walked to a seat on the stage, as she took the podium with a nervous smile. "Ah, thank you, Dr. Marlborough," she thanked him genially, before turning to the rest of the hall. "Ladies and Gentlemen, as you will already know, we at Cures USA have always been the first to discover new life within things presumed lifeless, and bring light to harmful bacteria left uncharted, as well as address cureless ails like our remedy for osteoarthritis and rheumatism, patented by the genius that is Dr. Avery Reynolds and myself, and the diabetes program cultivated in 2009; the work of the talented Dr. Michael Udinov and devoted Dr. Richard Mason."

She could see the crowd beginning to get antsy in their seats - they were really only here to know whether the strange hybrid had a single chromosome identical to human ones, and that was her area of study, so they were essentially here to make it harder to tell the lie she needed to. And she did have to tell this lie - she knew for starters that the genetics she'd compared in that strange rodent and her test subject was something that could radically alter the abilities assigned by Mother Nature to a human body. Abilities she wasn't sure the human mind had the self-control and foresight to manage properly and responsibly.

For word of it to get out would begin an epidemic to activate these recessive genes - people would begin trying anything to achieve the abilities she'd studied in the badger-mole; the telekinetic ability to shift, shape, harden, soften and mold Earth and Mud with sheer willpower. And she'd received some unsettling news this morning in regards to the dragon fossil. The lungs had been preserved over possibly millions of years by some kind of strange, flammable, natural gas her lab partner now believed to have enabled the strange dragon creature to breathe fire. She had spent the hours before this dinner studying Chinese and Japanese legends of dragons, trying to place the fossil as one of the lore in the old books.

The other two genes she had discovered out of luck, she told herself now - the badger-mole gene, and the one she'd found in the fossil had been on the same allele. That meant it was impossible to have more than two of these genes at any one time. The fact that these genes were recessive meant that they could only be activated in a person who was homozygous for one of the four, carrying two of the same kind. As far as she knew, at least.

A person homozygous for the badger-mole's gene could have that same earth-shifting power she'd been witness to at the research center in Beijing. She knew this for sure.

A person homozygous for whatever she'd found in the fossil could … breathe fire?

No. She was getting ahead of herself. She was a scientist, for god's sake - making assumptions wasn't what she did. She didn't get paid to make ideas - she got paid to bring to light new and innovative chemical concoctions; miracle cures and vaccines. She wasn't about to let _dragons _fly around her head; it would be stupid.

"But," she spoke to the hall of people, "a major disappointment to the science world has proven that the genetics found in the badger-mole hybrid were common in rodents, and standard of both badgers and moles. Nothing of significance is to report," she frowned. "Thank you," she added genially.

There were murmurs of disappointment, and a few people even got up and left.

Katherine hoped she'd made the right decision.

* * *

><p>"Naw, but seriously, man," Slugger, for that was what anyone had ever called him, toasted to his friend, holding up a Dixie cup of beer, "it's good to have you back. To see you without the plate glass between," he gave a hollow laugh that Aidan decided meant Slugger thought he was being ironic or intelligent in his statement. Slugger wasn't the brightest of boys, but his heart was never in the right place, and that made the Riker boy find him valuable to his cause.<p>

Aidan smiled briefly and coldly at Slugger, only barely affording him a glance of acknowledgement. "You takin' it up the ass in your old age, Slugger?" he teased calmly, his eyes turning back to the grungy makeshift table between him and Slugger, who sat on an old stack of milk-bottle cradles. Aidan's girl, or at least she thought she was, sat next to Aidan on the moldy couch the boys had liberated from the landfill, with an adoring expression on her face, watching him intently. Aidan memorized her name again - he was always forgetting it. Jen.

Slugger gave another one of his hollow laughs and nodded in good humor. "If you say so, boss," the burly teenager agreed, lifting a hand and wiping beer from the Fu-Man-Chu on his upper lip. Slugger was a dropout. He had been expelled at thirteen for punching a teacher in the face and breaking his nose, and his parents had never gone about getting him back into any school. It hadn't mattered, really - six months after being expelled, Slugger had left his parents to find a place in the poor district.

It hadn't been hard - he'd met Aidan and Daniel, the taller, thinner of the three, who Aidan liked to call 'Slick', two misfits just like him with their own place on the top floor of a cheap apartment building. The two had taken in the larger boy and decided to give him a home, a roof over his head and food in his stomach. Not to do something morally sound - because they'd liked the way Slugger killed rats; with a shoe on the tail and then a stab through the back with a Swiss army knife.

At that point, Daniel, who sat on one of those tiny trash-cans people bought for paper they had excess, turned upside-down, stabbed open the plastic rings holding the unopened six-pack on the table together. He pulled out a can of beer and refilled Slugger's Dixie cup before drinking from the can. "I got'n idea," he smirked with the can to his thin, chapped lips. "I say we go out in d'woods and scare d'shit outta those dumb bimbos doing them sorority pledges."

Aidan shook his head and leant forward in his seat. "You guys are still thinking small-time, Slick. Throwing rocks through windows and killing cats. I'm thinking _major. _I'm thinking something so big the whole fucking _state _could be affected," he told his friend with a dark smirk on his face, gray-green eyes finding their way to Daniel's dark brown ones. "I'm thinking about leaving a big, gaping **hole **in this fuckin' planet."

At this idea, both Slugger and Daniel gave a warm grin like that of a child on Christmas morning.

"How, man? How the fuck we gonna pull off somethin' like dat?" Daniel asked eagerly.

Aidan leant back in his seat and shrugged halfheartedly. "I don't know yet," he answered, taking a long and self-satisfied blink. "But when the opportunity presents itself, we'll strike."

Slugger grinned. "Always poetry-like with you, Aidan. Wouldn't know you was dirt poor from talkin'a you," he pointed at his friend with a lone finger.

Aidan recoiled at this indignantly. "_Poetic, _dumbass," he corrected Slugger with his teeth ground. "And I don't need to point out that you're just as penniless as I am, do I?"

"Sorry, Aidan," Slugger apologized ruefully, unaware of what he'd done to piss Aidan off, but figuring and apology would at least help things.

* * *

><p>Katara finally managed to sneak out of her house at around ten at night, completely having forgotten about her date with Nathan, leaving Suki asleep in her bed with a hot water bottle, a movie to watch if she woke up and the phone if she needed anything else. Katara remembered a few hours ago telling herself to stop worrying about, catering to and caring for others, fixing problems that really weren't her own. Kelly would've said it was because it wasn't her nature. Her nature was to be that way.<p>

Usually she delved into her Dark Tower books when she was rattled this way, but right now, she just needed to go for a walk in her warm clothes, and maybe just talk to Zuko - he always managed to lighten things up for her; even when he was down himself. She sighed, blue eyes down-turned and intently watching the ground beneath her as she walked along the sidewalk with a rueful frown on her lips; Zuko was probably in a deeper, darker hole than he had ever been in before.

'_I have a feeling things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better," _Toph had said.

Boy had she been right.

Light at the end of the tunnel? No. Oncoming headlights.

The Marina girl was beginning to see Toph's point. No matter how good things went for them, they could always just take a wrong turn and end up completely fucked, over, under, upside-down and sideways. As many ways as you could be fucked, they were right now. Right now she felt as if everything she'd worked so hard to lighten up was just painted black and screwed around.

Shaking her head, the blue-eyed girl looked up, allowing the teardrops of the sky to hit her warm cheeks, and saw she was walking through the poor district. A small child, possibly about six years old, ran across the desolate street, with a toy airplane held over his head, laughing sweetly and happily. Katara smiled weakly, and then she saw an even smaller little boy, probably only three, with bald patches on his small head due to some kind of scalp infection, torn trousers, no shirt and some cuts and bruises walked out of an alleyway and watched the older boy, tears spilling down a reddened, blotchy face.

"My-!" the little boy choked on his tears. "-Air-! -plane-!"

The older boy ran down the street and disappeared around a corner, despite the fact that the younger one wasn't chasing him, or even trying to catch up with him. Instead, the little boy only watched, wising and hoping to get his plane back. It just happened that the younger boy had stopped on her path to cry for his lost toy, so Katara approached the child with an expression of mixed feelings on her face.

The little boy looked up at her with huge, reddened, wet, gray-green eyes as if she were some kind of angel that could help him get his plane back, her lower lip jutted out and trembling. He reached up and scratched his flaky, sopping wet scalp with one hand, the other hugged around his bare, sinewy tummy, trying to keep himself warm in the continual rain that had fallen all day.

Katara opened her mouth to say something, but then shut it and sank down to crouch by the little boy, who couldn't have been very long out of diapers. She took off her navy blue winter hat and put it on his head, covering his scalp infection and the hand he was using to scratch it. The little boy watched her with some kind of look of surprise and adoration that she couldn't have placed if she'd even tried.

The teenaged girl flashed him a weak smile and shrugged her leather jacket off for a moment, turning it so only the leather side would get wet and putting it over her lap, and she moved to take off the turtleneck sweater she had had on under the jacket, to put on the little boy. It was pink, but it was warm, and when she scrunched it up to put on the little boy, he put his arms up to help her do so.

She gave him another smile once he was dressed in a warm hat and an even warmer sweater. Crouched with him in the rain, Katara almost lost track completely of her surroundings, just watching him examine the sweater with small, sweaty hands. The sleeves of the sweater came down right past his hands, and when Katara had tried to roll them up, he's fidgeted and pulled away, so once he stopped examining the sweater and put his hands to his sides, the sleeves came down to the floor and his hands were warm inside them.

The tears on the little boy's face cleared up and he gave a big smile, showing her a missing tooth she doubted had just come out on its own. The Painted Lady had been missing for too long, she told herself ruefully, but her train of thought was cut off by the little boy throwing his arms, with their extremely long sleeves, around her neck and in fact pulling her head down as he did so. She smiled herself and put a hand to the small of the little boy's back, returning the brief hug.

Then she pulled her jacket back on, stood and watched the little boy totter off down the street and into an apartment building. This drew her attention to the building, and the top floor window, where someone was standing in a room with the lights on, just watching her. Her eyes widened for a moment and she even took a few steps back, before allowing herself to fix her eyes upon those of the man standing in the top-floor window of the cheap apartment building.

Aidan.

Katara gasped quietly and then began walking again, pretending she hadn't seen Aidan at all, and pulling it off badly. She turned into the alley she'd seen the little boy come out of, knowing Aidan wouldn't see her if she went through there - and she was pretty sure it came out on Main Street, which lead to Maple Avenue, which took you to Milton Avenue, where Zuko lived. It was also where Lydia lived. In that terrah-cottah adobey caloneyawll … Katara gave a brief laugh. That was still funny. There was the rich district, between what everyone just called 'the city' and the poor district, and then there was Milton Avenue, which was closer to the beach, and actually richer than the rich district, for the most part.

Huh. Funny.

Well, it was the kind of thing you said 'funny' in relation to it, but really it wasn't funny at all. It just happened to be like that. You know what else wasn't funny?

"Heheh, hey there, Sugah," came a hoarse and smarmy kind of voice, the kind you heard at an AA meeting, with a druggy spin on it. The voice was ragged and raspy, but not in that charming way Zuko's was when he had had too many drinks. It was rough and guttural in a way that reminded her of the largely blotted-out memory of her near miss with rape, in the grasp of Jonathan Prescott. Katara hated being snuck up on.

The voice came from behind, so Katara turned on her heel, stepping back, away from it with her eyes widening involuntarily and suddenly. She saw a man in his late thirties to early forties, with a potbelly in a greasy wife-beater and those stupid knee-length shorts men were wearing more and more these days. His face was perhaps the most terrifying thing about him.

One eye was popped and milky, with a yellowy crust to its eyelid, as if it had become blind thanks to an infection, and the other was a rusty brown that made Katara think of Lud, a dying city in one of the Dark Tower books. There was a large scar across the eyebrow of his seeing eye, and a sickening smirk between red-blue lips and yellow teeth with smoker bile between them.

Katara took another step away from the man.

The man took a large step towards her, and she could smell beer. Lots of beer. "Where ya goin', young'un?" he took another ominous step towards her, causing her to take one too, backwards. "How'sabout I welcome ya's into grown-up-hood, hmm, girlie? How'sabout old Murph gives the rich girlie a go out in the rain, eh?" he clomped his foot down on the floor, in a puddle, and began a waddling, shuffling walk towards her, each step of which she followed with a backwards one.

Katara couldn't help but be a little scared. "G-get away from me!" she warned him with a step back, rain pelting her viciously and ruthlessly, making hair stick to her face and the back of her neck. She could beat him with a few choice moves, but … but, well, not only was she finding herself frozen in body and mind, but she had to worry about the identity of the Painted Lady. And to keep that a secret and keep away from this man with some simple forms, she would have to **silence **the man. And she wasn't going to do that.

The man chuckled haughtily, walking deliberately towards her. He lunged out with a hand to grab her by the wrist, causing her to shout out a negation. She elbowed him in the stomach and tore free of his grip, and began to run further down the alley. Murph, for she assumed that was his name, laughed as she ran, and chased after her. Katara panted, the rain swatting her in the face mercilessly and her legs pushing her across the tarmac with desperate speed, glanced over her shoulder and recognized with horror that he was gaining on her.

"No!" she cried out, turning her head back to the direction she was running in, her eyes widening at a chain-link fence closing off the alley. _**"No!"**_ she repeated, for it was all she could think at this point. She crashed right into the fence, wishing to god it would snap from the brick walls and allow her to roll onto her back and continue running. Her shoulder hit the fence first, and then her forehead caught a jagged edge of one of the links, slicing the skin as the fence bounced her back so viciously that she went sprawling onto her back. _'No!' _she screamed in her head. She hadn't gone through all this only to-

The man caught up with her, panting, and leant to wind his hand into her wet, dark brown locks and drag her to her feet, taking advantage of her shock at the bounce-back. He was still laughing that cackle that made her want to puke. He gripped onto her jacket and forced her to a wall, back first, so hard her head collided with the brick and she lowered it, expecting to fall into unconsciousness. But instead she fought.

"No! Get off me!" she screamed, regaining some control of her nerves, reaching out and grabbing hold of his wife-beater and pushing against him. He was too large for it, and he had the advantage of having her trapped against the wall. He continued to cackle as his hand delved under her jacket and caught a supple breast and the padding of the bra over it, right up until her knee came up and smashed into his thigh. "Get the fuck off!" she repeated mindlessly as he doubled over and let her go. She ran for the fence again, grabbing this time to climb it.

Katara's fingers grabbed the fencing at a high point on it, so that as she pulled on the fence and pushed off the ground at the same time, she nearly went right over. _'Yes! Yes! I'm going to get away!' _her mind cheered and screamed in her head, though everything but that one thought in her body felt like a heavy ton of bricks worth of ominous and menacing panic. Then her boot was stopped by a grip around her ankle, and she held onto the fence for dear life as the man tried to pull her back. She shouted out thoughtlessly, and then kicked with her free foot at the man.

She was sure she kicked him in the face, but he grabbed up and caught one of her belt loops to suck her down from the fence. She went flailing down like a sack of gravel, and landed on top of him with a dull thud and a groan. She rolled off him immediately and glanced around in a panic for something to grip to get to the roofs - Zuko was walking proof that the roofs were excellent to be used and travel- Katara suddenly thought of something.

"**Help!"** she screamed out hoarsely. It had never been something she was quick to think of. She had always been able to hold her own.

The man on the floor leapt to his feet and ran at her, aiming to grab her around the hips, but instead smashing his head into her knee, which she outstretched to knee him in the face, but caught the top of his cranium instead. He yowled and grabbed the top of his head as she gasped inwardly, grabbing her knee with wide eyes, sure she had felt something pop. She put her foot to the floor and her leg screamed out at the touch.

Still, she cried for help. _**"Help!" **_she shouted out, her voice beginning to get rough with the strain on her vocal chords.

The man got up and took another, stumbling step for her. He made a feral growl that nearly froze her to the spot, but instead, she managed to set her mind right and think. _'Think, Katara - what would Azula do? Azula's good at shit like this …'_

"_**HELP ME!" **_she shrieked out, thrusting her fist into the man's face. Well, Azula wouldn't have yelled for help, you know, being a one-woman army and all that, but the punch was plausible. He went sprawling back and fell to the floor, clutching his eye. With a bit of shock, Katara realized the way something had cracked under her fist, and that she had cracked his skull at the brow. When the attacker let go of his face, the bone over his eye was collapsed into it. As if he couldn't have looked more ominous.

And now he was fucking **pissed.**

"Get away!" Katara breathed hard, trying to catch her air.

The man groped for his footing.

Before anything else could happen, a shadow dropped down from the rooftops and Katara heard, but didn't see, a deafening thud. She even winced. She looked up from the collapsing man on the tarmac to the Blue Spirit. She frowned extremely hard and lifted a hand to her brow wiping at the rain and sweat on it. "What?" she glared viciously at him. "Did you get a fuckin' coffee first?" she snapped harshly, pulling up her jacket from where it hung halfway down her arm, showing him a bare shoulder outside her white tank-top.

The Blue Spirit crouched and picked up in his gloved hands something that had just rolled from the man's pocket. A bottle of pills. He supposed he should take the man to the precinct for narcotics, but when he looked up and saw Katara with her hands on her hips, doing that fake-anger thing she did to keep from being upset, he decided that was more important. Still … he also figured this guy needed medical attention. He probably didn't have medical insurance.

Shit. All of a sudden, he felt his mind fogged and he stood up.

Katara's expression loosened and she took a step closer to Zuko, an expression of suspicion on her face. "Hang on … why are you out tonight?" she asked, then allowing a small silence in which she watched him with parted lips and narrowed eyes. They had agreed the night prior that they weren't going to go out tonight, to limit their chances of being caught before a big job. "Oh … my … _God," _her face softened and then went into full-fledged shock mode. "Oh my fucking _God_, I can't _**fucking**_ _believe_ you!" she stalked up to him and poked him in the chest theateningly. "You fucking-," she cut herself off and then whapped him on the arm as if scolding a child, still in complete shock that he'd planned something so fucking **stupid.**

Zuko shut his eyes in his mask and then watched her pace in shock at his actions.

Katara was so taken aback by his idiocy that she actually turned and gripped her hair in the rain. "You're an asshole. You were going to go and **silence **the guy _on your own, _just because you think I'm going to freak out if I'm there? What the fuck kind of moron, psycho, idiotic, fucking-," she turned and moved to slap him in the face, but stopped herself, seeing the mask and using some self-control. "-_**jerk**_," she strained the word, "are you?"

Zuko grabbed her arm and watched her seriously for a minute. Through the mask, he could tell she was reading his mind, getting the look he was shooting her. _'We need to talk. Away from this,' _he told her in his head. She stared right back with piercing blue eyes that agreed, before tugging her arm back from him and crossing it with the other over her chest and glancing down to the man who'd tried to attack her.

"Are you okay?" Zuko asked through the mask.

Katara afforded him a cold glance in the rain. "Of course I'm not okay!" she bit at him.

Zuko sighed and reached down, grabbing down to drag the man to somewhere more visible, so someone could call an ambulance for him.

"Leave him. He's not going to die," Katara grabbed Zuko's arm and roughly pulled him up to his feet, heading toward the wall to boost herself up to the rooftops. "Toph is more important."

The man in the mask watched her in surprise for a moment - not the good kind of surprise either. A kind of surprise that he was unsure he'd even had in regard to Katara before. How could she be so cold? She wasn't like that, it just didn't fit her. She was the girl who gave everything she had, and then gave some more. She was the compassion kid - possibly even more than Aang. Even Aang had trouble with things like compassion and random acts of kindness. But, he supposed he had to get away from 'this', so he followed her.

* * *

><p>The two climbed up to a rooftop and moved for a while until they were stood atop the tallest building on Maple Avenue, looking down at traffic whizzing by. The wind would've taken Katara's hair aside romantically if the rain hadn't glued it to her skin. Zuko reached behind his head and undid his mask, tying it to his belt for a moment to exchange words with the girl to his left. To the side of his scar.<p>

'_When it's black, take a little time to hold yourself,'_

"I get that you're not okay," Zuko began in a low rasp, pushing back his hood and freeing his hair to the wind and the rain. The rain was strange on his scar - it always was.

Katara hugged herself. "I don't think you do," she watched the traffic with her eyes beginning to become wet. "I don't think you get just how … how _not okay _that I am," she heard her voice shake, her mind rattle and her body tremble. She shut her eyes and felt the rain on her skin, struggling not to let the tears flow. She envied Suki - she envied that Suki had someone to hold her while she cried. She hated that she was that person for everyone - that shoulder to cry on. Why didn't she have a shoulder to cry on anymore?

'_Take a little time to feel alright, before it's gone.'_

Zuko didn't look to her, and kept watching the traffic, but he took off his gloves, slid them between his hip and his belt and took one of Katara's hands in his at his side. It was soft and cold in his warm one. He wondered why she wasn't wearing something warmer under her jacket, but he didn't question it. "You don't have to be okay all the time, Katara," he whispered, turning his head and letting his golden eyes fall on her blue ones, taking a small sidestep to her, to get closer to her.

'_You won't let go, but you still keep on falling down,'_

Katara gave a small scoff. "You know I do. I'm the 'okay' one in our group. I'm the warm, gooey stuff that glues you guys together. I have to be okay. I have to be there to pick someone up when they're down. I'm always just _that girl, _there to pick up the broken pieces and carry my people through. It's what I do. I can't stop myself from doing it," she looked up from the traffic to meet Zuko's gaze, squeezing his hand as she did so, feeling a tear slip down one of her cheeks. She turned fully to face him.

Zuko smiled wanly and turned to face her the same. "Do you want to stop?"

'_Remember how you saved me now, from all of my wrongs.'_

She seemed confused by this. "Sometimes," she murmured in reply.

His smile widened to that one that gave her butterflies in the stomach. "Well then, go ahead. Be selfish for a little while. I'll be your Katara," he promised, squeezing her hand and giving her a small, warm smile as she looked up at him with huge blue eyes and spilling tears. He lifted his free hand and put it to her cheek, his thumb wiping away a tear.

'_And if there's love just feel it, if there's life we'll see it,'_

The younger girl closed her eyes and relished the touch of his hand on her cheek. "I don't know how," she gave a humorless laugh, her brow furrowing. "I don't know how to be selfish. I've …" she paused and sniffed in the rain. She opened her bright blue orbs to his golden ones, which seemed to be the only light in the gray-black night sky Katara saw behind him. She swallowed hard, her eyes falling on his soft pink lips for a moment, her words lost.

Zuko leant down for a moment and chose his words in a soft rasp. "You know how to be selfish," he assured her, his breath falling on her soft lips with a shakiness breaking off the end of his words. He was unsure whether it was the rain that made him shiver or her, but it didn't matter. She mattered right now, and nothing else. If she'd asked him to fetch her the haunting moon tonight, he'd have tried. Katara met his eyes and knew what he meant.

'_This ain't no time to be alone, alone yeah …'_

The timing on this, Katara mused, was the worst timing since Lydia's arrival at Dahlia Coast Public High. In a hole this deep, they shouldn't have even been thinking about letting go. Yet neither offered any hesitation at the other's touch, there was no thought for responsibilities or rationalities. This was them being selfish. This was for them to just _let go, _and allow the world to turn for a little while without anyone holding it up. By the gods, Zuko told himself in his head, by every god and in every sense of the word, they had waited too long for this. Too long to just stop holding onto the way things had always been, and allow the future its turn.

'_And I … won't let you go.'_

"This is really stupid," Katara's voice came on a hesitant breath that only barely was audible in the vicious rain.

Zuko gave a brief smile, his thumb once again wiping the wet from her cheek. "A lot of great things often are. We're superheroes," he pointed out, and then gave a small, situational laugh. How weird was this? How the fuck had their lives just turned so monumentally ass-up? In the five months since New Years', they had become superheroes, alcoholics, enemies, lovers, friends, allies, victims, saviors and _fucking _murderers. His laugh became a little heartier, and he shut his eyes in the rain to laugh harder. He had to take his hand from Katara's cheek to pinch the bridge of his nose at the way everything had turned out.

'_Say those words, say those words like there's nothing else,'_

After thinking about all that bullshit they'd thrown themselves into, Katara felt her stomach forcing her to laugh too. How the hell had all that happened? Since when had they been living in a television drama? Katara pulled her hand from Zuko's and wiped her eyes. "We're-," he laughed. "We're fuckin' superheroes!" she agreed, and put her head forward; rested it against Zuko's shoulder, struggling to speak through her laughter.

'_Close your eyes and you might believe, that there is some way out …'_

Zuko was fighting not to double over. "Sokka and Suki … _broke up!_" he chuckled in disbelief, squeezing the bridge of his nose and coughing out hard laughter. He felt Katara lift a hand to his arm to steady herself as she laughed. The two who'd been essentially married, who had been together for more than two years, and in high school, that was twenty years … broken up? What the fuck?

'_Open up, open up your heart to me now,'_

Katara shook her head on his shoulder, still snickering. "I- I got … _kidnapped_ by a _rapist_!" she squawked in laughter, before pushing her mouth into his black garbs and laughing right into his skin through them. Kidnapped! How the fuck had that come about? When the fuck does something like that happen to a person? Never! Katara's stomach began to hurt with how hard she was laughing.

'_Let it all come pouring out,'_

Zuko clapped his hand on Katara's shoulder to get her attention. "Ty Lee … got … pregnant-!" he choked out into the air, rain pelting them viciously, apparently not seeing the humor in their revelations. He tasted salt on his tongue from the rain. He had to add the next bit - it was possibly more outrageous than the first bit. "And- she had a- a miscarriage!" he squeezed her shoulder, trying to distract himself to stop laughing. "O-over your necklace!" he wheezed out a raspy laughter.

'_There's nothing I can't take.'_

Katara smacked him roughly on the upper arm, her lungs contracting each time she laughed. "M-my brother," Katara forced out between giggles, "knocked Suki up!" she smacked him again on the arm, her laughter making it harder and harder to breathe, but she didn't care. Suki! Pregnant! Katara's head screamed for some logic, and because there was none, she laughed some more. The sky gave a growl like a hungry stomach, almost ordering them to stop laughing - in this weather, you weren't supposed to laugh. You were supposed to cry in weather like this!

Zuko's eyes widened and he pulled back from her, meeting her eyes and stopping laughing for a few choice seconds. She kept laughing and looked him in the eye, and Zuko realized this was true, and then he felt his chest heaving in laughter again, nearly forcing him to double over. "Fuck-!" he laughed, reaching out for the railing on the roof to grip, to keep himself from keeling over in hysterics. "We got _**shot!" **_he added into the mix, and they were laughing again, just taking in the horrors done to them by the world.

Katara grabbed Zuko's wrist and tugged on it. "And- and Lydia!" she cracked up, lifting her free hand and winding it into her hair, squeezing out at the rain embedded in her locks. Zuko's laughter and hers just kept renewing itself with each reminder they dealt. "Lydia- tried to- fake a-," she choked out wheezing breaths between words, "a- pregnancy!" she squeezed his wrist so tight she was sure she was going to kill him, but they just kept laughing.

Zuko forced himself to stand straight and he looked Katara in the eye as she laughed; even laughing so hard she was snorting between laughs, she was beautiful. He struggled to smile without laughing, and it took him a few tries before he was able to stay completely serious, with only a smile. "And you know what's the funniest thing, right?" his voice was raspy and soft, with a bubble of enthusiasm under it from laughter.

'_And if there's love just feel it, if there's life we'll see it …'_

Katara nodded, reading his mind and lifting a hand to put on his chest to steady herself. "We fell in love," she admitted with a long breath that felt like the weight of the world leaving her shoulders. This time it wasn't a cackling laughter, or even a giggling laughter. It was the kind of laughter you gave to an ironic twist of the fates. And by all applying philosophies, it really was. It was so fucking ironic how it had turned out. They'd been besties for years, and now they were in love. In fact, at the _very_ start, they had _hated_ one another.

'_This ain't no time to be alone, alone yeah …'_

Zuko laughed at this too. "When the fuck did that happen, right?" he pointed out in good humor.

Katara shook her head, beginning to go soft in the mind with how hard she'd been laughing. "Oh …" she dragged out a long breath and continued to shake her head, her hand on his chest. She looked up and saw him smiling at her - that great, pearly white smile she'd told him to quit smoking for - with sparkling golden eyes that lit up the night like fire itself. She suddenly desperately wanted to kiss him, and something deep in her chest welled at the sight of his face, with hair now sticking to it in some places. "I want to kiss you right now," she smiled at him, her almost-should-have-been-a-long-time-ago boyfriend, her voice breathy and content.

'_I won't let you go.'_

Zuko smiled back at her, golden eyes on gorgeous blue ones. With a stirring in his chest, he realized he wanted to kiss her too. If she had asked him to fetch her the moon tonight, he'd have tried. The rain fell miserably, and it seemed as though the sky had given up on trying to depress them, even though the thunder rolled and the perpetual rhythm of the rain beat a solemn tune on every surface it hit. Zuko leant down and pressed his lips to Katara's, only a tender brush that deepened without anyone telling it to, one hand finding its way onto Katara's shoulder, the other taking her chin gently between his thumb and forefinger.

'_And if your sky is falling,'_

Katara's brows went up, her expression softening, her lips returning the kiss Zuko placed on them, lifting a hand to the side of Zuko's face, her thumb touching his scar with a gentle brush. She whimpered blissfully into his mouth, melting into him and feeling his tongue against hers. Ty Lee was right, she mused at the butterflies in her stomach and the heat she felt misting across her cheeks. The fingers she held on his chest gripped the black garbs of his stealth attire, just to be sure he didn't disappear as he often did.

'_Just take my hand and hold it,'_

The sky gave another threatening growl and the rain fell even harder in protest, but it was barely heard, ignored. Lightning struck, casting light across their glistening silhouettes in the dark, as the sky clapped out simultaneous thunder to accompany the snake of blue lightning shot through the clouds at the earth. If she weren't busy, Katara would've made a joke about the fates being against them or something.

'_You don't have to be alone, alone yeah …'_

Zuko broke the kiss for a moment, just for air, and then Katara captured his lower lip between hers, giving it a wanting suckle that nearly made his eyes roll back in his head in happiness. He relished each place his skin touched hers, breathing in the taste of her kiss, the smell of her skin; even the subtle way her fingers toyed with his shirt on his chest. He hadn't even noticed his eyes shutting in serene contentment as he held onto her, unwilling to let her go.

'_I won't let you go.'_

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Anyway, I've fallen in love with James Morrison's song 'I Won't Let You Go'. Oh and Suki is PREGNANT. Hell YEAH! It's on the hush-hush, though, so Katara has to be her damn support system. Stupid Sokka! Oh shit, I bet he'd be fucking pissed if he wasn't the father and that schmucky quarterback was … I don't know yet ****myself****. Votes anyone? YES! VOTE PLZ! **

**ZOMG bending FTW! I can't wait. Plus, I'm gonna close up that gap with Nathan next chapter. I feel bad for standing him up now. He was kind of**** cute in my mind. Anyone else think he was hot? Still, not as hawt as ZUZU! Don't you love the scenes where Zuko's hair is flying in the wind? ;) -lOlFaNgAsM-**

**So. My writing skill, still not as good as it used to be, but things are slowly returning to 'normal'; whatever that is. Next chapter the real Zutara starts - you know, the secret, yes-we're-seeing-eachother-but-nobody-knows-about-it smexy hawt Zutaraness? I hope I didn't botch this... I went back to my classic lyric-paragraph-lyric-paragraph style, which I haven't used in a while.**

**So yeah. REVIEW my lovely peeps!**


	15. Death For Us All

At some point in the small hours of the morning, the warmth Zuko's body brought to the equation had left Katara to her own devices. He woke early most mornings, but never before sunrise. This was the exception to the rule. Nothing beyond hugs and kisses had really happened last night, but he couldn't help but feel that something intimate had passed between them alongside the chaste embraces and innocent kisses, as he stood out in the dark night sky, with the sun's light preceding it over the horizon.

He hadn't wanted to smoke – he'd been smoke-free for a few days now – but with the reality of the 'job' rounding on him, he had decided to go easy on himself. So he stood on his balcony, fresh out of the shower, with a cigarette between his lips and a hand in his jeans' pocket, occasionally looking back through the open door to see Katara turning in her sleep.

With a smoky sigh, he admitted to himself that she was probably stressed too. At one point he'd sworn he'd heard her mumbling in her sleep; some insistent negation that he couldn't properly decipher. It wasn't fair for good people to lose sleep like this over the CIA's whims. Zuko considered going back to the bed and holding her for a little while, but ultimately decided to let her have what little rest she could salvage from her fitful sleep.

Some time after his cigarette was just a dead ember between his fingers, he walked back into his bedroom and stood a few feet from the bed, watching the slow rise and fall of Katara's chest as she slept. She slept with a slight, but perpetual frown on her face, her lips parted and brows down, one of the two strands of hair that insisted on falling before her face draped across a soft and rosy cheek. Just below where this strand of hair was rooted, a small, bloody cut interrupted the curve of her forehead.

It was a new cut; only barely scabbed over, with blood from its original bleeding still dried around it. And so he found himself sat at her side with a dampened cloth folded in his hand, dabbing at the cut gently. It was then that Katara's eyes fluttered open, and Zuko realized she wasn't as heavy a sleeper as he had originally assumed upon meeting her.

On this train of thought, he remembered the first time they'd met. It had been nothing short of conflict, two sheep butting heads, whatever you wanted to call it. Katara probably knew the story better than he did, but what he remembered was a new kid, Aang, in freshman year, racing down the hall with his new friends away from someone, smashing right into him, knocking him back into his locker and throwing his books out of his hand across the floor.

"Hi," Katara murmured with a tired, troubled smile, effectively ending his train of thought.

Zuko gave an equally troubled smile and continued to tend to the cut on her forehead. "Hi," he replied warmly, before his brows tilted up as best they could with the restriction of the raw red flesh surrounding his left eye. When the blood around her cut was gone, he put on the band-aid he'd been holding for it.

Katara would've laughed at his affectionate concern for her, but she couldn't find the humor to do so. The searching look in his eyes told her all she needed to know, and she sat up almost immediately, and put her arms around his neck. She buried her face in the soft crook between his neck and shoulder, and held him tight for a few moments.

For a second, Zuko was taken aback by the hug, but with a heavy breath he snaked his arms around her waist and pulled her closer. He sank his own face into her hair and squeezed his eyes shut, taking a moment in her embrace to push his burdens away and focus on her. It was no use, however; as comforting as her caress was, the idea of ending a man's life still preyed on his mind. "I love you," he choked into her chocolate locks, and he realized the lump in his throat.

Katara's grip tightened on him. "I love you," she replied anxiously. It reminded her of some movie, where a man told his wife to take the children somewhere safe, so he could save the world or something without worrying about them. "I love you so much," she heard her own voice crack and cursed herself for it. Maybe it was because she'd just woken up, but she doubted it. She half expected her next word to be 'but', and she figured he probably did too.

It became clear that as hard as the struggle to finally embrace their love had been, the struggle ahead was a lot harder. Boy, wasn't that just a kick in the ass?

Zuko briefly considered allowing himself to break down into childish tears with a long, dramatic rant about how he didn't want to kill anyone, how he just wasn't cut out to be a killer, how he was just a lil'ole mamas-boy a-tryin'amakadif'rence in this hell-hole world, but how Toph meant a lot to him, and everyone, and that he felt trapped and he just wanted everything to get better.

But really. Where would that get him?

In the end, it all came back to the fact that something needed doing and they had to do it. He'd learnt through a great deal of time and trial that in the end everything came to a simple choice. Cop out, or be a man and take your lumps. Well, you could call it an easy choice, but like most things, it depended on the situation. If the choice was between doing homework and going to a strip-bar in the city with Sokka and Aang while between girls, he'd pick the strip-bar every time, but if the choice was between letting Toph die, and killing a man … it was a little bit of a lose-lose situation.

So which was the lesser of two evils?

Toph was young, with her whole life ahead of her. And she was Zuko's friend. And she was Aang's 'better half'. And she was the go-to girl for parental advice. And she was an amazing computer hacker. And she always knew which booze went with a particular annoyance. She was a great friend.

But, on the other hand, Alain Baptiste was somebody special to someone too. He was a mother's son, too. He was someone's better half. He was the go-to guy for controversies and corruption theories. He had 'people' too. Zuko had had to force himself not to actually look up who the guy's people were. That would've just made it harder.

It wasn't an easy choice. That was the real point.

So, if he wanted, he could burst into tears and cry, _'Oh, please, I don't wanna do it, I want everything to go back to the way things used to be, but I feel so trapped and the world just wants to puke on every good deed that pops out of its asshole and I'm caught up in the middle of it! And I know you are too, but feel bad for me anyway!'_ but where would it get him? He was fucked. No matter how he angled himself, he was fucked. Kind of like prison, he guessed.

Katara somehow caught onto his train of thought, despite him just being buried in her hair and holding her and breathing her in to send away his worries. Somehow, she managed to pull back and take his face in her hands, her thumbs on his cheeks as if to wipe away invisible tears. She searched his eyes for a moment before giving him a reassuring smile. His golden eyes lit up the darkness, despite the shaded edginess she saw beyond them. "We can do this," she began with a steady voice.

Zuko wondered how she could be so sure. How she had even managed to settle her voice escaped him, partially because he was so lost in blue oceans that poured into him like a spear through sinewy flesh; relentless, precise. Necessary. She was younger than him by nearly two years, but now she was taking charge. She was holding him and comforting him and something about that made him want to cry. Her blue eyes reminded him of the cool of sticking his head in the freezer in the weeks after he'd received his scar.

She saw the look of confusion and comfort in his eyes and she had to consciously keep her smile from faltering. His face was inches from hers, but they had grown so close in the last few years that she could actually feel his anxiety; probably could have without touching him. He needed this, and she needed him. "We can do this," she repeated solemnly, her brows coming down for a moment, before softening again.

And then the reality of what she was saying sank in. _We_ can do this. **We** can do this. This was a 'we'. The reality of that had many defining adjectives, but Zuko could only list a few of them at the time. Heavy. Intimate. Serious. Comforting. At the same time, as wonderful as it felt and as comforting as it was, there was a weighty and consequent terror that came with it.

He pondered this objectively for a moment before melting into it, allowing it access to his deepest and darkest emotional holes and most significant shortcomings. The terror of this was that he was part of her, and she was part of him, and along with that came the horrifying fear of the possibility of losing her. The terrifying possibility of hurting her. This was a lot of things, but terrifying was the one that stuck in his mind. At least in that moment.

A tiny glint below the blue shimmer of Katara's eyes let him know they were lined with threatening tears just as his were, and he reached up to take one cheek in his hand the way she held his. Katara seemed to understand this. He saw what she meant and he believed in it as strongly as she did. He believed in when he moved to kiss her, she held no objection to it. His lips came crashing against hers in a meaningful and passionate way that forced her to allow one of the two tears in her eyes to roll down her cheek.

His other hand came to her shoulder and they tilted their heads to deepen the kiss as the sun began to claw its way out from under the horizon, its warm glow gracing the earth and bathing it in orange-pink light. There was a difference in this kiss to the one they'd shared out in the rain; the seriousness. This was a consoling, loving kiss; not a selfish and capricious one. Well, maybe it was selfish, but they weren't exactly focused on dismantling the logic of it right now.

* * *

><p>Suki hated the mall on weekends. Mostly because that was where all the jocks and cheerleaders and fucking assholeshung out on weekends. Un-fucking-fortunately, that was where she and Katara had planned to meet if they couldn't get a hold of one another by cell phone before the hospital appointment at 10AM. Suki wasn't particularly popular.<p>

She supposed they'd all fallen in together as a result of all being the misfits and rejects of high school society. They were adopted, ex-and-still-abused, half-orphaned, over-parented, neglected, over-defensive, scarred, hard-shelled, complex and evasive young people, but in high school, all that just amounted to 'losers', 'weirdoes', 'nerds', 'assholes', 'bitches', 'wimps' and other less-than-friendly names.

So, when Suki sat down on one of the ten benches surrounding the fountain in the middle of the mall, near the food court, she quickly glanced around to count the potential inconveniences. She counted some football jocks near the gym, further up the mall, including Dylan Greco, quarterback and potential father of her child, some cheerleaders opposite that, near the now-rehabilitated Tiffany's, a couple of sophomore kids hiding from the jocks by the computer store, and that freshmen group of wannabe girls that the pledge-girls were always preying on, just in sight of the jocks, occasionally waving flirtatiously at guys three years older than them.

Almost as if they had some kind of radar, the cheerleaders turned their heads the moment Suki thought nobody was going to notice her. Slow grins Sokka would've compared to those of Rhea of the Cöos grew on theirs faces the way moss grows on an old stone wall, and Suki pulled a face as if she had bitten a lemon at the sight of them. Great. Of all days.

The intrusive girls in high school don't speak and walk at the same time. They walk up to you deliberately, stop, ask you what really isn't their business in a manner that makes you sure that they think it really is, then judge your reply. Suki already knew this, but she noted it all the same as the five girls walked up to her where she sat.

"Hi, Suki!" the tall, blonde leader of them who Suki recognized as Coral someone greeted with faux friendliness. "What'cha doin'?" she asked, putting her hands together in front of her in an innocent way that Suki guessed meant she was trying to come across as a decent and noble individual.

Suki spared the blonde a distrustful and jaundiced glare. "Sitting down?" she answered sarcastically.

The blonde frowned as if confused, trying to figure out if Suki was being humorous or hostile. Then she decided on hostile and continued. "Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!" she teased and then teetered an annoying laugh that could've gotten Mother Theresa to punch someone.

"Someone woke up in the _wrong bed_ this morning," Suki teased back with a faint smirk gracing her lips. There was a rumor going around that Coral had (or was) spent/spending nights in the bed of Stephanie so-and-so's boyfriend, Mac What's-His-Face. Last names tended to escape Suki.

There was a small gasp from one of the girls behind Coral, and some resounding exclaims of 'what?' at this, and onlookers paid a little more attention. Some jocks further up turned their heads. Adults, who cared not for the skirmishes and conflicts of teenaged life, simply continued to walk on by, doing their Sunday shop in peace. The jocks near the gym took a few curious steps toward them, probably to listen in without getting involved. The freshman girls drew nearer too.

A girl behind Coral, slightly shorter, with a pixie-cut hairstyle in some kind of outrageous red color and a fake tan bordering on orange, reached and patted the blonde on her shoulder. Suki immediately recognized this girl as the Stephanie that Azula Scorsese was having trouble with. Stephanie, she recalled, had been kicked off the cheerleading squad for purposefully causing the head cheerleader to fall from the top of the pyramid last summer and break her ankle.

The shorter girl pushed Coral out of her way and peered down at Suki. "So why'd you break up with that Mariner guy?" she asked with a venomous smile on her face.

Suki rolled her eyes. "Ma-reen-ah; Marina," she shook her head and glance to either end of the mall for Katara. How could to confuse 'Marina' with 'Mariner'? The two were pronounced completely differently! Fucking bimbos … Suki imagined, briefly, getting up and walking away, but really this spot was the most likely spot for Katara to look for her.

Stephanie didn't just roll her eyes at this; she rolled her head in an exaggerated way that made Suki think her head was about to loll for a little while before falling off. Like she was having an allergic reaction to some kind of bimbo-pill she was on. "Yah, whatever; why'd you, like, y'know, dump him?" she raised a hand and ran her fingers over her pixie cut. Suki noted mentally that even Zuko had longer hair than the girl.

"Why do you care?" Suki answered in a nonchalant tone she'd picked up from Toph.

"Be-caaaaaause," she drawled out in a childish way, "you two were like, together forever. Yaknow what I mean? My guess is that he fucked someone behind your back, right?" she grinned, as if Suki had any idea how to speak that both ominous and retarded language she was speaking. "So who was it?"

Suki shook her head again. "We just decided to go our separate ways. That's really all there is to it."

Stephanie immediately pulled a face of discontent. "Come on, who's the slut? Tell," she demanded, her face contorting to a stiff and humourless expression.

Suki had no intention of trashing Yue's reputation. As far as anyone was concerned, Yue was a nice girl and nobody could say otherwise. Goody-two-shoes sometimes popped up, but otherwise, she was nice. Suki liked her, despite the fact that she'd screwed Sokka behind her back. And that was saying something. "There is no 'slut'," Suki replied sternly. "We broke up because he needed to put all his attention to his sister."

Stephanie cocked her head to one side in confusion, before one of the cheerleaders filled her in at a whisper about the news stories about Katara's kidnap. She looked shocked for a second before forming an intrigued kind of expression; that was, if a girl like her could pull off such a look. "Yeah, well, that's not a reason to break up. Who was it?"

At this point, Suki felt a bit like punching the girl, but that would only end badly; she was outnumbered. She lifted a hand and pinched the skin at her temple. All right; she supposed she'd go with a different approach. "It was the sugarplum fairy, okay? He fucked the sugarplum fairy," she answered sarcastically, with a sharp edge to her reply.

Stephanie stomped her foot this time and put her hands on her hips. "Oh, for fuck's sake!" she cried out in annoyance. "Come _on_, I just wanna know, Suki-boo-,"

Suki got to her feet and stared Stephanie down. "One, it's none of your fucking business, and two, you and I are _not_ friends so don't pretend we are just to get gossip from me, okay? Keep your big nose out of other people's affairs," she suggested poignantly, with a dry and cold look in her eyes. She glanced again for the main door of the mall, and saw Katara walking towards them and looking at the screen of her iPhone. Somehow she'd gotten it back. Suki guessed she'd probably stopped at the school to get it back.

"Aha! So he _did_ have an affair!" Stephanie pointed in Suki's face.

Suki knocked Stephanie's hand out of her line of sight, then pushed past the cheerleaders to jog up to Katara. The Cheerleaders all gave a groan of annoyance and moved after Suki, though gravitating more toward Tiffany's than them. Stephanie stood where she was and watched the two girls with crossed arms. Suki and Katara's paths crossed just a few yards away from the gym, far enough away that they wouldn't get dragged into anything the jocks were discussing, but close enough that they could hear them.

"Hey, where'd you go last night?" Suki asked immediately, tapping Katara's arm and gaining her attention.

Katara looked up. "Huh? Oh," she tried to search her mind for an answer. "I was at Aang's house," she lied calmly. She'd have to text Aang to provide an alibi should anyone ask. Aang was good that way; if you asked, he'd provide. He was a good guy, she noted mentally; he didn't deserve to lose Toph. And that was why they had to kill Alain Baptiste.

"Oh," Suki drew out her appointment slip from her shoulder bag and examined it carefully, being sure nobody could see the hospital logo on it. "Hey, Katara, where's the 'Esther' wing at the hospital? I've never been to-," her whispering was cut off by an abrupt but friendly shout.

"Hey!" came a familiar voice.

Suki shoved her slip back into her bag and glanced over her shoulder to see Sokka jogging after them from the gym. This obviously wasn't her day. She'd probably get to the OB's examination room today and find out she was carrying twins, each with eight legs and three eyes, and hermaphrodite genitalia. And then she'd probably get hit by a car on her way home. Karma? '_Karma my ass._'

"What's up, Sokka?" Katara greeted her brother coolly, as if they had nothing to hide. She'd gotten better at lying for some reason.

Sokka gave a goofy grin. "The sky?" he put his hand on his sister's shoulder. "Where you guys going?" she inquired curiously.

"Vegas. Tijuana. San-Fran. Who knows?" Katara shrugged, eyes flicking to the Tiffany's she'd broken into a few weeks ago. "We're open-minded. You have any suggestions?" she gave her brother a mischievous smirk and lifted a hand to his on her shoulder, patting it affectionately.

Sokka snorted a laugh and patted his sister's shoulder again. "You see dad this morning?" he gave a humoured smirk as if he'd pulled a particularly good prank.

Katara raised an eyebrow at him. "No. Why?"

"He found my pot stash," Sokka tucked his hands into his pockets as if this were nothing. "And smoked it."

Katara choked. "**All** of it?" she gawped at him.

"The whole damn baggie."

The two siblings shared a giggle that made Suki have to roll her eyes. True, the bond between brother and sister was sweet, but despite being the bigger person, Suki really didn't like Sokka very much right now. And that was allowed because the chances were that she was carrying his kid and he was an adulterous man-whore. She was allowed to get a bit wound up at him making jokes and having a laugh as if things didn't just happento fuck you over, and stillbe the bigger person.

* * *

><p>'Bored' was the understatement of the year. Toph had started off so bored it was annoying, and then the annoyance had become irritation. After irritation came vexation, and now she was just fucking infuriated. To counteract her rapidly deteriorating patience, she had tried counting in her head, but had stopped after two hundred. She had tried going to sleep, but with the blaring lights in the interrogation room, she couldn't, despite her exhaustion.<p>

One would've thought the CIA could've afforded her a cell with a bed, but nope. They were just plain old Assholes. Every eight or so hours, a woman in a suit would take off the cuffs, frogmarch her to a bathroom and stand outside the door while she went about her business. Two meals a day had been the norm since Thursday, and now it was Sunday. And the food wasn't too nice, either. Some kind of gray slop was served for breakfast, and she assumed it was supposed to be porridge, or oatmeal, or even rice pudding, and her dinner was some kind of microwave meal, which at least was edible, though still bland and tasteless.

For the first three days of her incarceration, she'd had the Angry Birds game on her phone to keep her occupied, as well as sending text messages to Aang and Sokka and watching shit on YouTube by helping herself to the WiFi connection of the top-secret CIA headquarters in Virginia. You could always find something to do on the Internet. But, in the early hours of Sunday morning, her phone had crapped out with a dead battery. So for the past six hours, Toph had been bored, annoyed, irritated, vexed and infuriated, other than the time she'd had to eat her gray slop breakfast.

Toph had calculated by the clock on the wall that her microwave dinner wasn't for another six to eight hours, so when an agent walked into her 'cell', which was really just an interrogation room with two chairs and a table, Toph knew something was up. Especially because he held a laptop bag on one shoulder, and in the other hand, he held a paper bag by the top, with a fist around the neck. And he wore a smile.

"Good afternoon, Miss Bei Fong," he greeted in a charming tone that failed to charm her, pulling up the chair opposite the table where she sat, and putting the paper grocery bag on the table. Toph was handcuffed to her seat, unable to reach out and inspect the contents of the bag. "How are we today?"

Toph squinted at the guy as if he were retarded. How the hell did he thinkshe was today? She hadn't slept in three days, had no idea when she was going home, had no idea what her friends had to do to bring her home, had eaten only shit for food for three days, and was handcuffed to a goddamned chair with pins and needles in both ass cheeks. How the fuckdid he thinkshe was doing? "What do you want from me?" she kept narrowed, pale green eyes fixed on the agent before her.

The agent's smile twisted in some kind of amusement. "You're a smart girl, Miss Bei Fong. Your parents must be proud," he glanced down mischievously as the girl before him ground her teeth, "… though disloyal," he added with the same kind of charmed pleasure at her discomfort. Most would say it wasn't easy to piss off the great Toph Bei Fong, but that was because they hadn't discussed her parents with her.

"Fuck you, Mister," Toph grumbled darkly, imagining the agent before her with a knife protruding from his forehead. "If you want something from me, you're going about it the wrong way."

The agent's smile stayed plastered on his face, which Toph noted had a cut scar across one tanned cheek. The man's skin was interrupted by green-brown eyes Toph's mother would've called 'hazel', and he had a nose that looked like it had been broken a few times. He reached to the paper bag on the table and opened it, one hand delving in and bringing out something in a thin plastic wrapper.

A twinkie.

Toph stared at it for a moment in awe. She could taste it already. Real food! A creamy, spongy, foamy twinkie, just hovering for her to grab it … Before she'd finished imagining the twinkie, she was filled with deliriously delicious thoughts of what else could be in the bag. She let none of the emotions that came with these imaginings cross her face. That was what he wanted.

"Are you hungry, Miss Bei Fong?"

Toph could've strangled him for saying such things. In a diplomatic tone, sitting straighter and blinking professionally, Toph spoke. "What exactly is it you're trying to get from me?" she then stared at him with cold, emotionless eyes. "Information?" she queried.

The agent chuckled and brought the laptop bag at his hip up onto the table. Toph recognized the bag as her own, by the green charm linked to one of the buckles on it. From the front pocket of his suit, he drew a USB device and showed it to her. "Decryptions," he explained simply, putting the USB on the laptop and folding down the paper bag to reveal some other treats; chocolate bars, candy bags, donuts, cookies … you name it, it was there.

Toph leant back in her chair and smirked.

"Get me some coffee and we'll talk."

* * *

><p>It rained hard. The sky beat against the windowpanes like zombies trying to smash their way into the building. Though Katara worried less about the rain and more about the OB. With Suki lying on her back on an examination table, sweaty hands linked over her tummy, blue-green eyes looking around nervously, with her t-shirt rolled up to just under her breasts, hoping to god the OB was a woman. With her luck the way it was, it probably wouldn't be. On actual inspection, Suki swore she saw a bulge to her tummy. She also remembered having trouble on those flights of stairs at school – the ones she'd sworn she'd practically glided up a few weeks ago.<p>

Katara stood by the window, not far from the door she guessed the OB would enter through, watching the rain bring the view of the world outside to shimmer and oscillate in a smooth downward ripple. She had one bare elbow on the windowsill and a fist under her chin, watching the rain with lazy eyelids. A painter might've called the image romantic, but Katara saw nothing romantic about the situation. "You don't believe in abortion," she assumed aloud, glancing to Suki and them looking back out at the rain.

Suki's eyes darted to her friend and she gave a curious little frown. "No," she raised a single eyebrow and twiddled her fingers over her belly. "Do you?"

Katara cared little for this question. She guessed she was the kind of person who'd abort a pregnancy that was the result of a rape, and at her age, she'd probably have an abortion if she happened to get pregnant, though she doubted she'd be dumb enough to get into that situation, but she supposed it rather depended on a number of matters. "I guess I do. But it depends." She looked back to Suki, her gaze staying for a longer moment this time, before returning to the gleaming ripple of the rain.

Suki's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "So if you got knocked up, you'd abort it?"

"Now? At fifteen? Yeah."

The girl with the auburn hair pulled her mouth to one side. "Even if the baby was … Zuko's?" she managed a tiny smirk.

Katara had opened her mouth to give a quite generic and stoic answer, but she paused. "Huh?" she sputtered turning fully this time and putting the heels of her hands on the windowsill behind her. This had to be a trick question. She was trying to get her to give something away. "What do you mean?" she frowned.

"Well, let's say you guys had a hot one-night stand and a bun magically appeared in your oven, would you let a doctor _cut_ your baby out of you?"

Katara watched Suki with a rather horrified expression on her face. She made it sound like some kind of barbaric practice that went on in seedy alleys and dark basement operating rooms. "The chances of me and Zuko having a hot one-night stand on the fly, without protection, are extremely low. And, if somehow we couldn't _stave off_ the kind of …" she was about to say 'horniness' but then she wondered if that was even a word, "… _lust_ … that would result in that actually happening, I would … _still_ have an abortion. My dad would kill me for getting pregnant in the first place, but he'd eventually calm down and take me to terminate the pregnancy."

Suki rolled her eyes and gave a groan of annoyance. In the first place, Katara's family could at least afford a damn abortion. Suki had to think extra hard about it. An abortion, she guessed, was cheaper than giving birth. And she didn't even know if she had health insurance. Somehow Katara had arranged for Suki to be seen on Katara's health insurance, but she doubted it would last right through a pregnancy, should she decide to keep the baby. And besides, there was Sokka – or Dylan, god-forbid – to consider. "You wouldn't even discuss it with Zuko?"

"Nope; nothing to discuss. I'm fifteen. He'd legally be a sex offender for screwing me."

Suki stared at Katara for a moment.

Katara's mouth formed a perfect 'o'. "Uh- Not that I don't want him to screw me, but I'm just saying-!"

Suki broke out in laughter.

"Oh, come on, Suki!"

Suki wiped her eye from laughter, taking on a more serious tone. Her next question was a serious one. "Alright, alright … but if you were in my position … what would you do?"

The younger girl adjusted the bottom of her tank top and crossed her arms over her chest. What did she say now? It depended. Everything always depended on something. It depended on the father, it depended on whether or not Suki was ready to be a mother; giving up school was a big decision, and if the father was a jerk like Dylan Greco, Katara would feel icky just having that guy's … whatever … in her belly. She supposed if Sokka were the father, he'd give everything up for Suki and the baby. She knew that much. "It depends," she sighed, blowing an awkward strand of hair out of her face and glancing out the shimmering window to the gray sky.

Suki groaned. "Doesn't it always?" she asked the ceiling. Then she gave a situational laugh. She wondered what Toph would say when she got back to discover her friend was knocked up. Toph would probably make one of those 'can't keep it in your pants' jokes and smack her on the back, as gently as one could do such a thing. Suki had a feeling Toph liked kids, despite her inherent hard-ass-ness.

Then the door made a clicking noise and swung open. A tall, female doctor with a long, straight red ponytail to her shoulder blades, walked in with a chart in hand. Katara had once been afraid of doctors – because when you tried to skip school by faking sick, and your parents took you to the doctor with the simple phrase 'prove it', they always proved you wrong and got you packed off to school. Which sucked. But now Katara wasn't afraid of doctors – they fixed what she inflicted. And while she could say a lot of people hadn't seen the things she had, that was untrue with doctors.

"Sorry ah'm late – one o' ma' patients went intuh' premature labor earliuh this moa-nin'," the woman with the red ponytail looked down at the chart in her hands, speaking with a quite prominent southern accent – Suki guessed the woman Alabama-native - then with a frown; "Katara Marina… It says here you're only … fifteen?" she looked up and eyed Suki sceptically. To Suki, with her accent, 'fifteen' sounded like 'fiftayn'.

Suki glanced to Katara, who only offered a mischievous little smile, and then groaned. "Yeah, that's me."

The woman gave a tiny grunt. The parental permission slip was signed, so it was bureaucratically sewn up, but she still hated all these teenaged pregnancies going around. It was some kind of pandemic; the US of A wasn't quite as bad as little old England was on that front, but it was still bad. Sex was reaching ten-year-olds' ears. It was disgusting. If Katara had known what the doctor was thinking, she'd have been glad the woman didn't know what Toph and Aang got up to.

The doctor glanced to Katara with a cold, brown eye. "And you?"

One corner of Katara's mouth tugged upward in a protective half-smile. "I'm her sister," she announced calmly, seriously and proudly.

With a nod, the woman turned her gaze to an ultrasound machine in the corner and approached it. "Mah' name is Dr. Shauna Peyton," she glanced to Suki's abdomen, wheeling the ultrasound machine closer, "and I'm guessin' this is yo' first ultrasound during the pregnancy …" she gave Suki another judgemental glare and lifted a kind of gel tube from the shelf the machine rested on. Suki had done her research online and already knew all about this part.

Suki propped herself up on her elbows, and in the back of her mind, noted how fat such a movement made her look. "We're actually … not sure it _is_ a pregnancy," she interjected in a tiny voice, finding the judgemental look the woman had in her eye rather daunting and intimidating, "b-but we want to be sure, right?" she glanced to Katara for help.

Katara frowned at the way Suki's confidence flailed at judgement, and fixed her blue eyes on the woman applying clear lubricant gel to Suki's middle. Suki didn't deserve to get dirty looks from some uppity southern-belle bitch with a vendetta against teenaged mothers. Not after all the shit she'd gone through with her parents' divorce, and her step-father … "Yeah, we do. And we'd like to _get_ sure without enduring that miserable fucking look on your face, lady."

Suki's eyes widened in horror, and she stared at Katara for a moment. She wanted to say 'Katara' in a scolding manner, but right now, _she_ was Katara, and Katara was … well, her sister. And she couldn't blame her for sticking up for her sister, really, but Suki didn't want to piss off the lady they were paying to help them with their situation.

Dr. Shauna Peyton scowled and lifted the wand from the ultrasound machine, before glaring at Katara. Dr. Shauna Peyton had a reputation as a woman with a hard stare, but when she met the calm, deliberate, cold, threatening stare of Katara Marina, she felt something in her stomach stirring. Dr. Shauna Peyton was sure her blood even froze in some parts, but Dr. Shauna Peyton kept on staring the girl down. The girl didn't back off. "I will not take verbal abuse in this hospitale, ma'am," she ground her teeth.

Katara continued to stare at the woman with the eyes of the girl who'd shot bullets through men's flesh, arms crossed just under her breasts. She stared at the woman as the Painted Lady, with hatred and vengeance in her heart. Suki didn't deserve to first see her baby in the presence of some fundamentalist, bullshit-swilling moron, and she wouldn't stand for it. "Can we step out of the room?" she gestured to the door and then glanced to Suki, who was watching with a horrified look on her face.

Dr. Shauna Peyton put the wand back and walked past Suki to the door. Katara opened it for the doctor, offered Suki a reassuring smile, and followed the woman out of the room. Then she looked to be sure the blinds between the hall and the examination room were shut, before closing the door behind herself and meeting the gaze of the taller woman with a polite but stern expression.

"Girl," Dr. Shauna Peyton said this with a particularly condescending tone in her voice, "I don't know where you get off tellin' me how ta' do my job, but I can assure you ah'm one'a the best OBGYN's in the state. I graduated from Brown University at the top of my class and I have been running the Obstetrics department in this hospital for the last two years, so if you think ah'm not qualified to look aftah' yo' sistah', you ah _sorely_ mistaken," the woman ranted indignantly, with Katara listening calmly and intently.

Katara gave a small smile. "I'm sure you're perfectly qualified, but I can see you have some kind of passive-aggressive subjectivity in the matter of teenaged pregnancies," she pointed out with that sane, sober look on her face, blue eyes on brown ones, "So you see my dilemma. I love my sister, and I want the best for her. So I don't really want one of the best OBGYN's in the state, I want one of the best in the country. I want someone who graduated top of their class at _Harvard_. But really, I'll settle for someone who's just not going to make her feel dirty and irresponsible the whole _fucking_ way through the pregnancy," she blinked slowly, and then allowed her smile to fall to a dirty glare, "and you fail to meet that criteria." That unspoken undertone of 'send me someone else' didn't really need aloud acknowledgement.

Dr. Shauna Peyton didn't like this. As was apparent by the 'o' shape her mouth formed and the way she stormed off down the hall, smacking Suki's chart down on the nurse's station, and power-walked down the hall with fists at her sides, her oh-so-perfect ponytail waddling from shoulder to shoulder as she walked as fast as she could. Katara watched her walk for a moment, standing outside the door, that cold frown returning to a pleased little smirk.

She had nearly turned to go back in and tell Suki to get dressed, when she saw a handsome, young-looking male doctor who'd been standing and watching as Katara sent Dr. Shauna Peyton packing, approach the nurse's station and pick up Suki's file, walking towards Katara at the door. Katara stopped and waited for the doctor. He was cute – too old for her, but a girl could look – tall, mulatto with dark blue eyes, short-shaven hair and an amused little smirk that bore bright white teeth.

The doctor cleared his throat. "Uh, sorry, but did you just throw Peyton on the scrap heap?" he gave a both surprised and jealous smirk as he asked.

Katara smiled at him. "Didn't like her attitude."

He put his hand out to shake. "I'm Dr. Hudson. Sam Hudson," he introduced himself as they shook hands, "and you … are Katara Marina."

Katara's smile faltered slightly, "you read my file?" she inquired sourly, letting go of his hand.

He shook his head. "You were all over the news a few weeks ago," he pointed out, "what you did was so brave," he commended, still smiling. Katara was liking him more by the second. And then he frowned, quite hard. "You're not pregnant, though, are you? That's-,"

"No!" Katara hissed suddenly, a slight nervous chuckle under her voice. "No, it's not me. My friend-," she stopped herself. "My name's on the file, but it's for health insurance purposes. It's my sister."

Sam Hudson knew she had no sister, having watched every nitpicking news show on the story, but by the way she said the word, he saw no need to question it. "Ah, uh, I'm a fifth-year resident, but my focus is Obstetrics, so if you have an appointment and no doctor…"

Katara just nodded; glad she had gotten rid of Dr. Shauna Peyton.

* * *

><p>Sokka had ended up going back to the gym in the afternoon, his morning session apparently not putting him off doing more. He had let himself go, just a little bit, without Suki to tell him not to have bacon at every breakfast, and smack him if he had more than one dessert a day. He wanted to make quarterback, and the only way to do that was to be Greco's stand-in and then be a better quarterback than Greco on the field. And coach would only put him as Greco's number-two was if he was in shape.<p>

That was the reason he was doing crunches, sweat dripping off him, in a simple blue training tank top, some knee-length shorts that Katara was always complaining about, and his gray-but-used-to-be-white sports sneakers. While Greco and a couple of the other guys on the team hung outside the gym, Sokka and most of the other team players were inside, pulling their fingers out to get in tune for the game on Tuesday. At least, he'd thought Greco was outside.

"Hey, Marina," Greco chortled from behind Sokka, and one of the guys near him chortled too. "If you think coach is gonna give you my spot, you're just as crazy as your whacko sister," he teased coldly, wearing his varsity jacket like a trophy in the form of apparel.

Sokka rolled his eyes and continued. "At least my sister never fucked freshmen," he pointed out; Greco was rumored to have screwed a couple of freshmen girls on promises of popularity and friendship, and one of them had actually told her friends Greco had a, quote, 'teenie-meenie-peenie'. Boy, had that been a scar on his ego. Sokka had relished it.

Greco scowled momentarily and then retorted, "At least I never got dumped by a chick."

Sokka sighed, "The humility comes with it would do you good, Greco," he gave a grunt, continuing his crunches. He thought of Suki for a moment. Suki and her crooked smile, and the way his jokes came from her mouth, and the little, amused smile she gave when he told a joke she'd already heard. God, he'd be lying if he said he didn't miss her. If he didn't miss her in his arms when he slept at night. But he still had to move on. Just not yet. He could give himself a while to cherish some memories.

Dylan gave a blink that, if he'd been looking, had told Sokka that he had no idea what humility was, but wasn't going to say it aloud. And then an evil smirk crossed his pathetic fucking face; that classically good-looking face with that stupid Justin Bieber hairstyle that you had to toss your head to get to sit right. "Look, Marina, I didn't come over here to trade blows with you, 'kay?"

"That's a first," Sokka said.

"I just came to tell you I fucked your girl, Suki."

Sokka paused, only briefly, in the breathy gasps of the two boys standing near Greco in their varsity jackets, calmly considering this. There was a short moment in which his blood threatened to boil, with the image of that lowlife bastard on top of Suki in his head, but then logic kicked in and he reminded himself that Suki had more class than to jump into bed with an ass like him only a week after their break-up. Besides, guys made asshole jokes like that about people's mothers and sisters, but you didn't take them seriously. They were just supposed to be hurtful, snide jokes to piss you off; to rattle your cage.

Sokka sniffed the air as if he were some kind of detective, pausing in his crunches. "I smell something," he glanced over his shoulder to Dylan and then smirked, "Bullshit, perhaps?" and he returned to his workout, muscles bulging under a layer of sweat worked up over the last couple of hours. He frowned, rubbing the curve of his jaw gently between his index finger and thumb, the rest of the fingers on his right hand tucked in the shadow beneath his chin, wiping away whatever sweat he could.

Dylan's lips curled in a malevolent grin, and he blinked in a nonchalant way that usually made Sokka's skin crawl. "The strawberry birth-mark on her 'lower back' - it's a perfect square," and then he added, at the way Sokka slowed his own movements to a halt, turned his head and stared, "still think you smell bullshit?" his brows rose up under his ridiculous fucking fringe in a self-impressed grin.

Sokka stared for a long time at Dylan. By the way his buddies were exchanging glances, they didn't see how a birthmark on her 'lower back' could mean they'd actually fucked. She could've just stretched her arms up and accidentally lifted her shirt enough for a birthmark to be seen. Except that Sokka knew the birthmark was actually on one of her ass cheeks, and before they'd become sexually involved, she'd felt the need to inform him of a small birthmark on her 'lower back'. And like that, Sokka was up on his feet, all ties to his workout completely forgotten. Dylan Greco had a moment to decide where to protect himself, and he raised his hands to protect his face.

Bad move.

Sokka's right fist was launched across the space between them, into his rival's stomach. When the quarterback clutched his middle, Sokka aimed a left-hook into Dylan's jaw, but instead hit him in the mouth with force enough to knock out teeth. Unfortunately, Dylan's teeth remained where they were. Sokka had only planned to punch him twice; no biggie – just repercussion for nailing a girl on the rebound just to be a fuck. He heard Greco's back hit the wall he'd been leaning against, and tried to stop himself from propelling his foot across the air into his groin. Dylan choked out in surprise, and the two boys who'd been at his side lunged for Sokka and grabbed his shoulders, pulling him off Greco.

Heads had turned, and the other team players that'd been present abruptly ended their training sessions and watched the unfolding of the situation. They'd known this had been coming – they'd seen Marina and Greco brawling for the past few months, with the way they'd been at each other's throats. Now they needed to decide what to do about it. Greco was their quarterback – he led them onto the field – but Sokka was their friend. If Sokka saw an area where there was room for improvement, he'd point it out and work on it. He put the time and effort into the team that Greco should've.

Sokka flailed to get at Dylan, not doing well against the careful grip of his teammates. "This is the last straw, Greco! I'll fucking rip your nuts out and shove 'em down your throat! Get off me-!" he ordered them darkly, "that bastard had it coming!" he insisted seriously, tugging against them. They liked him – they just had a game on Tuesday and they didn't want their quarterback out for it. They were playing a school in San Francisco that held a record for the most overkill touchdowns, and they had a secret weapon.

Dylan grunted, clutching his jaw with a vile, forbidding scowl smeared on his face. His stupid hair was now no longer falling properly, his top lip was split on one side, and it was beginning to bloom red. He then allowed himself a condescending cackle that Aidan Riker would've quite liked. "Y'like that, Marina?" he murmured, regaining his composure. "The bitch _howled_ for it. For someone to take hold of those nice big _tits_ on her chest, huh, Sokka?" he spat viciously, a crude grin on his stupid fucking face.

Sokka struggled harder to get at Dylan – he wouldn't just maim him now. He'd _fucking kill him_. He'd rip the lowlife, scumbag, slime-ball son of a bitch into tiny little bits and then feed him to Katara's puppy. The rat would get what he deserved, and he'd get it from Sokka's hands, too. "You chickenshit son of a bitch!" he cried out, wrestling his best to escape the mediating grips of his teammates. "You'd better sleep with one eye open!" he threatened loudly, "I know where you live!" he heard his voice crack as he yelled the way it usually did. Katara always made fun of that.

As Dylan continued to laugh, some of the other players approached.

"Hey, lay off, man," one of them, Tyrone Shirley, a tall, black, well-built, muscular guard player with warm brown eyes smacked one of the boys holding Sokka back on the shoulder, "Greco's gettin' him all riled up. It ain't his fault. You'd do the same if some asshole went all like he did your girl, ex or no," he clapped the boy on the shoulder again, and that one let go of Sokka.

Sokka watched Dylan like a serial killer with his sights on his prey, vaguely aware that Tyrone was helping him out, breathing as hard and hot and heavy as a pissed off bull.

"Yeah, Greco, you can beat it if you're just gonna stir up shit, alright?" another boy, thinner but still tall, by the name of Jackie Johnston – most people called him JJ – glared at the quarterback. Greco outranked him, a new running-back player on the team, but if these guys backed up assholes, he didn't want to be on their team. "Hit the road if you don't want your face rearranged," and he gestured to Sokka quite stoically.

Dylan narrowed his eyes at the new player, and opened his mouth to retort, but was beat to it.

"Man, I think that's the best idea you had since you made the team," one of the bigger boys, another guard, a short-haired blonde with deep-set eyes and a hard, permanent frown, gave his version of a smile and clapped the running-back between the shoulder blades. Sokka knew this guy as Sal Montgomery, one of Mai Tamesis' ex-boyfriends. Sal looked to Tyrone and then to Inigo Rodriguez, a heavy-set half-Mexican guy who was part of their secret weapon plan. "Guys, get him out of here," he gave a nod that looked like a go-ahead.

Tyrone and Inigo literally grabbed Dylan by both arms and disappeared out into the gym lobby through the archway.

The remaining hold on Sokka was then gone. Sokka sank to the floor, his ass hitting it rather gracelessly, and looked up at Sal, who frowned emotionlessly, offering him a hand up. Sokka grabbed it and got to his feet, scowling and murmuring some unpleasantries about how Dylan Greco fucked his mother and things of the sort.

* * *

><p>"So," Katara drummed her fingernails on the back of her iPhone, her feet up on the dashboard as Suki drove with a smile on her face. "Do Iget to see the picture of my niece-slash-nephew that you got from the doctor, or are you just gonna drive with that dopey grin on your face?" she shot Suki an amused, yet childish look, the corners of her mouth tilted up and the corners of her eyes crinkled with a smile.<p>

Suki's grin split a little wider, and she turned her head briefly to glance at Katara, before returning her gaze to the road. "Ten weeks," she breathed out, ignoring Katara's question and once more repeating how far along she was, widening her eyes momentarily at the reality of … well, everything. "How did I go ten weeks without knowing I was pregnant?" she asked herself, amusing herself with that question to avoid any questions about how she felt to be carrying Sokka Marina's baby; about how she felt about carrying any baby. She couldn't rid her head of that repetitive, low, swooshing sound.

Swoosh-oosh. Swoosh-oosh.

The image on the screen, and indeed on the photograph tucked in her jacket, had been so blurry she hadn't been able really to see anything other than the fact that she was, in fact, pregnant. She had seen a head-like shape too, but the most real thing about the whole ultrasound had been that little swoosh, constant and unchanging, and so human it was beginning to give her goosebumps. There was no way to describe that sound, try as she may to find a word for it.

Katara sighed contently. "You had a lot going on. And time just … slips, sometimes. The important thing is, now you know what's going on in your tummy, and it's up to you to decide where you go from here. It's a hard decision for anyone to make, I would imagine," she thought aloud, the rhythm she'd been drumming against her phone ending abruptly as she stared through the shimmer of rain on the window to the gray of the world around them, bouncing white light off her blue eyes and causing them to sparkle, at 12:30pm in the afternoon.

Suki brought the car to a stop at a red light. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean, keeping a baby at sixteen with no dad in the picture isn't an easy decision to make. There's school to consider, as well as a number of other things. Like your parents," Katara mused pensively, her chin resting on dainty fingers and the side of her head against the glass of the car window. When the windshield wipers did their work, Katara could see the glistening of the rain on the street, and the public benches, and everything around.

Suki frowned, hard and fast. "It's not a decision I have to make. I don't believe in abortion, Katara. It's sick and disgusting and evil and … and it's murder," she seethed in disgust.

The younger girl afforded Suki a short glance. "Yeah. That's what I thought you'd say."

"I can't believe you're pro-abortion," Suki murmured darkly.

Katara rolled her eyes. "I'm not pro-abortion. I just think it's a valuable option to women. Not all women are strong enough to have babies in all circumstances. I'm … I'm pro-choice," she explained mildly, "If Jonathan Prescott _had_ raped me, and I'd ended up pregnant, would you have gotten all fundamental on me for wanting an abortion?"

Suki's expression softened. "Well, no, I guess not …" she admitted reluctantly, eyes on the changing light ahead of the car.

The smile returned to the Marina girl's face. "Besides, Suki. It's not like there's _no_ dad in the picture. If you need anything, you know Sokka would-,"

"No. I'm doing this on my own."

The car pulled away from the intersection.

With a knowing smirk, Katara reached out and patted Suki's hand on the gear stick. "No, you're not," she corrected her sister, eyes still pointed out the window, fixed on the rain.

Suki's eyes flicked back to her sister, and smiled in grateful understanding, returning her eyes to the road with a small, reassured smile on her face.

Then Katara's phone cried out her new techno ringtone. _'I died in my dreams, what's that supposed to mean? Got lost in the fire. I died in my dreams, reachin' out for your hand, my fatal desire.'_ Suki shot Katara a look of amusement at the song. Katara snatched it up, hoping it was Toph. She wasn't far off. It was an unfamiliar number. That could only mean …

Katara tapped the screen of her phone and brought it her ear, her amusement gone in a flash, replaced by some deep contempt and hatred. "Hello?" she answered by force of habit – how else did you answer the phone? She had meant to answer with something like 'Painted Lady here', or something more serious, but she came of sounding just like the fifteen-year-old girl she was.

"_Painted Lady_," a man drawled with a slight chuckle in his voice, "_There's been a change in plans_."

* * *

><p>Night fell like a shroud on the shadowed city. The Blue Spirit only noticed when he pulled himself from his nightmarish daydreams, having been crouched atop a skyscraper in the heart of the bustling urban setting, eyes pointed out to the sea, glossed over in reminiscence. The sun sank below the horizon, only barely visible between some parted clouds, leaving behind an orange glow, and then the weight of the darkness above pushed it away, leaving only a faint memory of that hazy, clouded sunset, leaving an open hole in the clouds through which Zuko could see the clear blue sky, until the pink-glowing clouds meshed together again as one, and the rain began to fall again.<p>

The weather had been doing that all day; raining and stopping, raining and stopping, as if saving its last heavy rainfall for midnight.

A whole pack of dead cigarette stubs were crumbled in the rain on the rooftop at Zuko's feet. Somehow, he'd managed to smoke them without removing his mask. The swords on his back felt heavier than usual, and he guessed they'd feel even heavier in his hands, possibly even reluctant. Hesitant. Like he felt. He waited for Katara, even though many times that day he'd considered the opposite. The dark night sky fell early, as it had through the winter, as though the day had forgotten in was summer. Hell, Zuko scowled, the whole damned town had forgotten in was nearly summer in this spell of miserable rain and clouds.

"Blue," came a familiar voice, unchanging and constant, though underlined with a certain stretch of tension.

He didn't even turn his head. Her voice made his stomach churn in distaste. Thoughts of that morning had sat in his mind through the day, and he'd eventually developed a sickness of them – a sickness of her sureness, her naivety, and her innocent, gullible trust. How the hell did she know he wouldn't turn around and kill her too? What made her think she was safe to be running around in the night with a premeditated killer? What kind of stupid, guileless, callow schmuck was she?

"I made contact with them. They had me pick up the plans for Baptiste's loft apartment. So we could plan out a strategy for entry and escape," she drew closer, red-painted lips parting as she focused on his hunched form. He now looked a lot more like Batman than Spiderman, with a dark, eerie demeanor instead of a childish, wet-behind-the-ears demeanor. "And the plans changed. Somewhat. It's not a big thing. I can sort it out."

Zuko got to his feet and shot her a dark look that she caught despite the mask. "Do you have a strategy, or do you need _my_ help to put a basic entry-exit plan together?" he growled sharply, in a harsh rasp that made Katara wonder if he was still the same man she'd held this morning – if he'd changed in the twelve hours since she'd last seen him. He looked back out to the skyline, and then down to the street below. His eyes picked out the lights of some cars stuck at a red light.

Katara's hands stiffened on the gunbelt on her hips, and her brows tilted up in hurt. "I have a rough idea," she answered mildly, eyes shifting away from him.

"It'll have to do," The Blue Spirit grunted, and she could hear the way his teeth clenched on one another. "Let's fucking go already," he seethed hatefully into the cold, humid night air. He turned and glared at her through his mask, as she stared at him through hers, lips parted, ponytail flowing on the damp breeze, one hand resting on one gun, the other clenched on the handle of the other … to protect herself.

She didn't even recognize him anymore.

* * *

><p>Alain Baptiste lived in a loft apartment, and he was nearing forty years old, married to a twenty-four-year-old dancer at a strip bar on the east side of town. That much was apparent by the pictures on the shelves and walls and the cheque left callously on a sideboard in the hallway. She was pretty; too young for the guy, but pretty. Katara stepped into the main living area with one gun drawn, her eyes fixed on the pictures, taking in the life that was about to end.<p>

A lot of the pictures were just of the wife – webcam pictures taken on a stupid angle, shot in black and white. They were those Facebook pictures that morons put on their pages to look dark and mysterious. But the other pictures, the ones with meanings, they were of Alain Baptiste when he was younger, with two teenaged boys at his sides, and the remains of a cropped-out woman closer to the age of the columnist. The boys weren't twins, but they could've been, if the younger one hadn't had a softer jaw and a bubble-nose, probably from his mother, who Katara guessed wasn't the twenty-something woman in the pictures nearby.

It wasn't late – Zuko could hear the television on in the next room, with Oprah yapping on about something or other. It had to be between eight and nine at night, and the apartment was so large that nobody had noticed them sneaking it through the front door once Katara had picked the lock. At the sound of a high-pitched, snorting, cackling, graceless laugh, Katara figured the young dancer-wife was watching bad television nearby. Something both terrifying and exhilarating exploded in their stomachs at sneaking into someone else's home. Suddenly, a thought occurred to Katara.

They had planned for Baptiste to be alone when they came to kill him. But now there was a witness. And if Zuko was going to be busy with Alain, it was up to Katara to figure out what they were supposed to do with her. Shit. _Shit!_ It took a little effort to calm down. Things would go ass-up if she started freaking out, and that notion made her want to freak out even more. She nearly screamed when Zuko tapped her on the upper arm, as they came to an open doorway on the left side of the hall, but she held it in.

The way they moved was something between a crouch and a walk, Zuko crouching slightly more than Katara, occasionally putting a hand on the floor to balance and shift his weight better. Sneaking came easier to him than it did to her, he supposed, with a dark and condemning grimace under his mask. A column of light spread from the doorway before them, across the hall the two moved through. Possibly the only handy thing about this column of light was that it made the shadows beside it a lot darker by comparison. So when another door further up opened, and a man in an argyle sweater crossed the hall into another room, carrying a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream in his hands and a spoon in his mouth, he didn't notice the two black-clad figures crouched in the darkness.

This was good; if the operation became too disorganized, there would be unnecessary bloodshed.

Zuko pulled Katara back by the upper arm so that he was closer to the doorway, and then in less than a second, he crossed the beam of light and tucked himself back into the shadows, undetected. The woman in the other room didn't even pause in her amused chuckling at the break in the light from the lamp on the coffee table. Zuko pressed his back to the wall, careful his swords didn't make any noise, his knees bent so his feet were right under his ass, so he could spring to his feet if he had to, and looked to Katara through his mask. With hand gestures and telepathy, he told her to stay where she was. And then by the way her lips pursed on the uncovered half of her face, he understood her question; what should I do?

'_When the fighting starts, shut her up. I don't care how_.' He whispered in a cold and deliberate tone.

Then she watched him for a moment, lips parted as if she wanted to speak, brows tilted up worriedly under her white mask. She began to doubt her own words, earlier. Could they do this? She was ever becoming more assured that he could, but she began to doubt her own capability to handle this bullshit. Her exit strategy wasn't going to work if the police stormed the place before they were out. Her plan was to get out into the hallway, and then take the roofs until the sirens died down, and then change their clothes and split up. Rid themselves of the smell of blood.

Zuko moved in the shadows, away from Katara and the beam of light, to the door Alain had walked through. Katara's eyes followed him, her throat tight and dry, both hoping he would afford her a glance, and hoping he wouldn't. He wouldn't be the same leaving the room as entering it. She mulled this over with turmoil written on her face, covered by a mask that allowed it to fester and settle to eventually perch itself in her mind, a dark, unforgotten blot on the face of her memory. He looked back, but it wasn't to look at her. It was metaphorical. As if he were looking back on who he was, and hesitating to move into the shadowy life of a killer. He fixed his eyes on her, for a moment. That was all he gave; a moment. A moment that held only disgust and scorn for her, a kind of hatred even he couldn't explain.

There was no music in the back of Katara's head in the second he disappeared into the next beam of light. No pensive wondering. No feeling. No emotion. Nothing. She felt completely empty – a hollow husk of the person she was. But then emotion rushed back to her like a wave crashing on the beach, and the first to hit her was terror. She was more aware of this than the scream and the crash from the room across the hall – the way her emotions changed and detected the commotion before her head did. Then there was a shout, and Katara leapt to her feet, staying in the shadows. Her eyes darted down the hall, back to the front door, and she considered running, but then the woman in the living room gasped out and made a beeline in Katara's direction.

The Painted Lady instinctively moved into the doorway, blocking the living room off from the hall. The woman before her was about Katara's height, if not taller, with a short, curly, blonde mop of hair tied in two low pigtails at the base of her head, and she wore a yellow-orange midriff top with the words 'Morning, Sunshine' on it, with some stretchy Capri leggings. The Painted Lady didn't see any of this. She just saw the wide eyes, the open mouth, the glimmer of tears beginning to rise up in light brown eyes, and the reflexive way the woman recoiled with a few stumbling steps.

Katara's eyes were just as wide in her mask, and she struggled not to hear the shouting in the next room; the breaking glass, the yelling, the struggling. She couldn't find her voice past a few sputtering, incomplete words and meaningless syllables. The woman let out a staggering, earth-shattering scream that made each and every nerve in Katara's body tug at the same time, amounting to a kind of flinching motion that tightened her hands on her guns. "Shut up!" she yelled suddenly, drawing one gun into her hand, panic written on her face. "Right now!" she added in a threatening tone.

The woman stepped back, tears dripping off her chin. "Don't hurt me!" she sobbed, her voice gritty with tears – her accent wasn't French. Katara knew accents, and this woman's was American. Oprah still chattered along on the television. "T-take what- what you w-want!" she stammered tearfully, groping for the table near the couch to stay on her feet, legs turning to water, or at least that's what Katara thought she was doing.

Katara swallowed to fix the dryness in her throat, knowing her lips would be chapped if not for the red lipstick on them. She lifted a hand and aimed the gun at the blonde, struggling to keep her eyes from widening at her own actions. She'd never drawn a gun on someone so helpless. It felt wrong. "Keep your mouth shut a-and keep your hands where I can see them-,"

The woman had grabbed the lamp producing all that light, ripped the cord right out of it and hurled it at her. Katara didn't even have time to move out of the way. Squeezing her eyes shut, she lifted one arm, the one with a gun in it, and held her forearm in front of her face to protect herself. The porcelain lamp smashed against her skin, shards splitting it in some places, the impact hard and merciless against the bone, and she ground her teeth to keep from yelling out in pain. Blood dripped across her forearm, and then fell from her wrist, hitting the floor, the sting of her pain coupled with the clouding of her vision dulling her senses. Without her sense of sight, she accidentally fired a shot, silencing the television with a loud explosion of ballistics and electronics.

When she opened her eyes, the room was darkened by the lamp's absence, and the television, which had been mounted on the wall, had a large hole in the middle of its screen. Katara expected it to fall, and once the thought crossed her mind, it did. One side sank down, and then the next, and it crashed to the floor with a loud clatter. Blue eyes suddenly searched for the woman who'd thrown the lamp, her lips splitting from one another and baring her teeth in a primal, instinctive way.

Her eyes turned at the sound of a hard breath, and she saw the woman near the window, grabbing something from a shelf secured to the wall near it. Katara managed to get out of the way this time, and a small piggybank-looking thing flew past her head, whistling near her ear as it whizzed by. She groaned out, annoyed more than anything else at the persistence of this crazy bitch. Most people shrank back at an intruder; just not this lady.

"Stop!" Katara shouted across the room. "I'm not here to hurt you!" she yelled indignantly, brows coming down.

"Bullshit!" the woman yelled back in reply, pulling most of the items on the shelves off onto the floor in her panic.

She couldn't really blame the woman, to be fair.

Then the Painted Lady caught sight of what the woman was really moving towards. A panic button, at the back of this shelf. She guessed in two seconds flat that it was linked up both to the alarm system that had failed to alert anyone of the intrusion, and the local police station. She couldn't think of a word to say, so what came out of her mouth happened to be; "Ah!" in a panicky, startled, gasping kind of shout. And then annoyance hit her and she growled out, "Oh, for fuck's sake!" training her gun at the woman as best as she could with her mask somewhat askew, changing her point of view. The alarms began to howl out a loud, high-pitched bleating noise.

The blonde grabbed another item while the Painted Lady was lost in her own irritation, and hurled it across the room, toward the intruder. It was a large, heavy glass trinket – a wedding present – of a woman in a ball gown, curtseying pleasantly, with a smile on her clear face. It sparkled in what little light there was in the darkened room, only flashing into the Painted Lady's view for a second before exploding into shards against her shoulder. The intruder's grip on her weapon released in surprise, the gun dropping to the floor with a clatter that seemed to resonate louder than any other sound, including those in the study, where Katara could hear, in the back of her mind, the struggle between her partner and the target, and beyond that, there was the echo of the alarms in her ears.

The clatter of the gun was only overshadowed by the loud thump of her weight hitting the wooden flooring on one shoulder. She gave a grunt, and rolled onto her back, trying to look both for her dropped gun and her opponent. She found both in a flash, on in the other's grip. The woman married to Alain Baptiste was running for the gun dropped a few feet out of Katara's reach. The blue eyes of the Painted Lady widened and then narrowed, before she rolled away from the gun to grab the doorframe and get her footing back, drawing the other from its holster. She fired a shot at the woman, aiming for the legs, but missing in a blurry haze of movement. She had to immobilize her, before she did some actual damage. It was amazing what a person's instincts could bring them to do in a pinch.

If this could get any more disorganized, she'd be surprised.

The blurry image of the blonde got shorter for a moment, as Katara felt her back press against the wall, and her head began to clear, her vision sharpening, and she guessed the woman ducked low. Blue eyes flashed brighter in concern. '_The gun!_' she heard a shout in her own head. She wondered why she felt so tired. Why she felt her energy dripping away like the blood on her skin. The dizziness passed, around the same time her vision became sufficient for a Mexican standoff.

The woman with the curly pigtails picked up the golden gun and trained it on the Painted Lady, who aimed a gun right back at her. But if she had learnt anything from this conflict was that the masked woman didn't want to have to kill her, or even hurt her. Then the shouting in the next room came to an end, and she froze all over. _Alain. Alain, Alain! Dear god, Alain! Her husband!_ She squeezed the trigger. **_"_****_Alain!_****_"_ **she screamed out, tears resurrected in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks and dripping like the blood on her wooden floor. Her husband, her love! After all this … after all the fights with the ex-wife, and the lawyers, they had finally been happy, and now …**_"_****_ALAIN!_****_"_ **she shrieked out, this time, her voice wavering, and she squeezed her eyes shut, firing three more shots at the Painted Lady with tear-blurred, closed eyes, two of which missed, the other which didn't, before the gun dropped from her hands, and hit the floor once more.

There were no words for the kind of pain that seared … no, burnt … no, tore,through Katara's flesh. Her upper arm was home now to a bloody hole on each side of it, and if the scrape-cuts on her forearm were painful, then this was the hell she deserved. The Painted Lady's back thumped against the wall and she felt the air leave her lungs as if they were both punctured with massive needles. She gasped for breath, the blood she'd wiped on her own forehead from her forearm mixing with the pained tears smearing their way down her cheeks. By the way the other woman shrieked, she knew with horrifying conviction that she was in the same, if not worse, pain. Her love was dead. They could both feel it by the deathly silence that had taken over, in the room across the hall. Those blue eyes threatened to roll back in her head, but she forced them open to look at her wound. She had felt the bloody tunnel through her arm, but upon seeing it, she had felt her throat wanting to vomit out the contents of her stomach. She forced it aside.

The Painted Lady let loose a guttural, growling shout of agony, not unlike the ones already being spewed into the air by the other woman. She pushed her feet against the floor, and felt herself sway away from the wall, her left elbow clenched in her right hand, below the wound, to keep the arm still. She glanced to the sobbing woman on her knees and immediately doubted the danger of her. She was wounded. Unable to fight on. Again, she felt like puking. The sound of the crying made her want to cry more than the bloody wound in her upper arm. Her head was spinning, but she managed to grab her other gun from the floor without falling, and drag her body out into the hallway, careful to trail as little blood as she could as she moved.

She grabbed the doorway of the study, and pulled herself into it, her eyes moving slowly, as if she were a cancer patient, or some other soul in a terminally ill body. If she'd had the energy, she'd have screamed, but as it was, she couldn't. She couldn't even widen her eyes with the little energy she had. They needed to get out of here. Alain Baptiste's blood was pooled around his body on the wooden flooring. The body was facedown in it, his throat slashed open. Katara didn't have to guess it hadn't been quick; she knew it had been slow and painful, but not because the Blue Spirit was a psycho - because he had hesitated. Then she looked to her accomplice, who was standing further from Katara than where the reporter was dead on the floor. His breathing was heavy, as she could tell by looking, and he was on the verge of screaming his throat to a bloody pulp. In the minutes they had been here, she was sicker of the color red than she'd ever been before; it was splattered on his garbs, and on his mask. Her companion wavered on his footing, and reached to grab his head.

And then the Blue Spirit collapsed.

Everything below his knees gave out first, and then once they hit the wooden floor, he began a heavy, graceless descent to the hardwood, head first, and Katara imagined his eyes rolling back in his head behind his mask. The sound of his swords clanging against one another in their sheathe was nowhere near as loud as the blaring alarms or the whooping of the sirens outside, but it echoed in Katara's head just the same. The Painted Lady moved to catch him, but his body hit the floor like a ton of bricks, and her movement was hindered and limited by the blood under her feet. Once again, her stomach lurched. A blue light flashed through the window and cast a long shadow on the wall, of her figure standing in the blood. She grabbed Zuko, with her good arm, by the cloth on his unconscious form and struggled to lift his weight from the floor, but eventually she held him draped on her good shoulder, her hand clenched on his black garbs, the blood flowing down her other arm all but forgotten. She would get him out of here, if it was the last thing she did. She owed him that much.

* * *

><p>AN: The dark-n-twisties are back. Just when they finally patch it up and get together, all hell breaks loose. More to come! Oh, and My hard-drive crashed, that's why it took so long. I sent it away for repair, and when it came back, my internet was down, and it didn't have Microsoft Word. So I had to re-write this chapter, when it was nearly done, and I had to wait for my internet to get back up. And now I have to download all my old chapters, because I hate not to have them on my computer. For research purposes, you know.

**Yeah, so I guess Toph will be coming back soon. Or will she? Haven't the plans changed?**

**And will Sokka confront Suki on the matter of Dylan Greco? Will he find out he's going to be a father?**

**And what about Zutara? Will it last in the dark shadows the two have delves into? Can it survive?**

**P.s. Thanks for sticking with me even when the hiatus between chapters was too long for words! And if there's a spacing problem with this chapter, it's because the italics are acting up, so I had to remove them, and I was too lazy to go about fixing it all up. :P sorry! And I know this chapter is extremely long. Again, sorry!**

**Clicky-clicky-butty-button? Revyoo? ^_^ love you guys!**


	16. Love Thine Enemy

_"Zuko? Zuko, where are you?" – a voice. Teasing, toying._

_"Mom?"_

_A chuckle. "Guess again," in a low and amused hiss._

_He is in a dark and empty abyss. Alone. Cold. Scared. "Azula," he assumes, his voice braver. Constant. Unwavering._

_"Perhaps," the voice replies in a cheerful, teasing coo._

_"And me?" – another voice. Older. Raspy. Familiar. Supporting and comforting._

_Without hesitation, he replies. "Uncle." Relief is in his voice._

_"Yes, nephew," in a sigh, lacking the relief in the boy's voice._

_And it is a boy, in the darkness. He must be only nine or ten years old, with a ponytail of midnight black hair at the back of his head, that ends just in the nape of his neck. His face is untouched by age or injury, perfect in every way. Golden eyes are stationed in his head, changing constantly. He can feel this. He just can't see it. It's like they get dangerous, and then revert back to the eyes of a child. He feels as if his eyes will burn the skin around them when they change, and then they are bearable, before flaring up again._

_"Where am I?"_

_As soon as he asks, everything changes. Blinding light is everywhere. He covers his eyes, and when he can see again, everything is white. His clothes seem to have changed on his form; they are a long, white shirt to his youthful knuckles, and a tunic-type bottom to his knees, over some kind of training trousers. His feet feel cold on the warm, white, invisible floor. When he looks up from himself, he can see his own eyes, in the mirrors surrounding him, in a circle._

_"Uncle! Azula!" he panics, backing from the mirror in front of him, only to feel another against his back. His eyes really are burning him this time, and it hurts. The burning lasts longer than he thinks he can take it, and he shouts out, turning and seeing terrible golden killer's eyes glaring back at him in the mirror. He screams this time, the shout not enough to free the terror in his stomach, welling and making him want to vomit. He can't get away. He's trapped with himself, his eyes burning. He's trapped with a killer._

_After this, the dream fades away. And he is lost in the deep and dreamless sleep of unconsciousness._

* * *

><p>The motel room was cheap. Dirty. It smelled like the foul remains of some psycho-ass orgy, and now it smelt like blood too, thanks to all Katara's, slipping down her tanned, bare arm, and Alain's, spattered all over Zuko, where he lay on the bed. She was glad he was unconscious, but nowhere near as glad as she was that she hadn't had to see the killing. It had to have been brutal; for both of them. Death never seemed to hit Katara from the right angle. It swallowed her up and took everything under its shadow.<p>

"Nngh!" she gasped, her throat so sore from her pained exclaims that everything out of her mouth was gritty and absolved of modesty. "Fuck!" she put down her uninjured hand next to her on the tile floor; it was trembling now with cramps after sorting out the injuries in her opposite upper arm. Blood-clotted stems of her new hair – a tawny chestnut color, cut into a wavy, uneven end at the base of her neck, changed to hide her identity – stuck to her neck and jaw as she bared her teeth in suffering.

_"Alright, kid. This is going to be the worst part," _Zuko's cousin continued on the phone, and it reminded her of those damned telemarketers that called at all hours. _"Did you get the disinfectant I told you to get?"_

Katara gave only a groan that sounded somewhat like an answer.

Lu Ten sighed heavily on the other end. _"Open it, and pour it on your shoulder, until it runs down and covers the bullet wounds and the shards on your forearm. You might want to hold something in your teeth."_

The Painted Lady snarled in hate, sat on the motel room's bathroom floor, and grabbed the bottle of disinfectant with her shaking right hand, popping off the cap with her thumb and bringing it to her other shoulder. She clenched her teeth in preparation, and then tilted the bottle. Pain shot down her arm like fire in her veins. She choked out a strangled sob, forming a blood-covered fist at the end of her scarlet-doused arm, and another around the bottle. The disinfectant poured out a little more gratuitously.

"It hurts!" she gagged in a gravelly voice, "Oh, **fuck**, it hurts!"

But that wasn't even the half of it. The pain never stopped – it got so bad her arm went numb, and then she hung up and wrapped her bullet wounds in bandaging, from about two inches above the higher bullet wound to two inches below the lower one. Blood seeped through the stitches and into the bandage initially, but that ended a few minutes after it was wrapped. She pulled herself off the bathroom floor and set about cleaning up the blood.

She glanced into the bathtub, where Zuko's swords were soaking in pink-red water; relieving themselves of blood, reaching up and fixing her coppery hair. She looked up and caught her reflection in the mirror with a grimace. She hated having short hair. The cut wasn't feminine; instead it was boyish, messy and ghetto, and she hated every single fucking hair of it. And the reddish brown color just made her sick. But it went with the blood, she mused darkly.

She nearly jumped when there was a murmuring noise in the next room. Katara moved to the doorway between the two rooms she'd rented, and saw Zuko stirring in his sleep. He still wasn't going to be up for awhile, she noted, both in relief and worry. She supposed she'd better get some sleep too.

But first she had to get rid of the blood.

* * *

><p>Zuko woke up with a terrible taste in his mouth. Like he hadn't brushed his teeth in three weeks, and then had spent a night sucking cock for pennies, or some random shit like that. He was aware he was awake, but he dared not open his eyes for fear of seeing a goddamn mirror in front of him. He had slept like the dead for god knew how long, and he'd sleep for longer if he could. But now, sleep wouldn't come. Maybe he had slept too long, maybe he was just haunted, but he couldn't sleep.<p>

He eventually opened his eyes and saw the white ceiling of a cheap motel room above him. With a frown on his face, he forced himself into a sitting position and looked around, reaching up and scratching his head. The whole place reeked of sex, and piss, and blood. He attributed the last to the red stains in his black garbs, and scowled into the bright daylight. _'How long have I been out?' _he wondered in his head.

He caught sight of a figure curled up on the couch, chin to chest, forehead to knees, one arm draped over its own body in a careful position. The arm he could see was wrapped, above the elbow, and below the elbow, there were a series of long, shallow cuts that looked like the outcome of sticking the arm through a window. The figure released a tired sigh, and Zuko realized it wasn't asleep.

_"No! Please, don't! I'll do anything!"_

He turned his eyes away from Katara and looked out to the sunlight pouring in between the cheap curtains, before squinting. "Where are we?" he asked dryly, before running his tongue over his bottom lip, lifting a hand and pushing his hair out of his face to rub at his good eye.

Katara looked over her shoulder from her position on the couch, and proved he'd been right. She hadn't been asleep. She moved into a sitting position and blinked in the daylight. "Some cheap motel on the highway," she answered, checking her watch. If he were less concerned with himself, he might have noticed the gritty rasp in her voice.

He looked back to her and his eyes widened. "What the hell did you do to your hair?" he snapped in surprise.

_"Please, monsieur! I have children!"_

Katara stared at him for a moment in surprise at his sudden outburst, before shaking her head, reaching up and grabbing the top of her head. "It's a wig," she answered curtly, pulling the damn thing off her head and tossing it in a pile of stuff on the floor. Her hair fell out from underneath, tied in a braid that began at the base of her head. "I didn't want to get recognized. We have to go to LA to pick up Toph. Her father decided to send her on her own and head up to DC to rub elbows with the higher-ups or some bull like that."

Zuko's shoulders drooped in some kind of relief, but his muscles were still tense with annoyance at her very presence. "What happened? How did we get here?" he swung his legs off the bed, turning his back to Katara and eyeing the floor with a scowl on his face. "How long was I out?" he added curiously.

_"My wife- Denise- no, no! Je ferai n'importe quoi! Jacob! Benoit!"_

"You passed out. I didn't want to leave you." She got up and approached a sideboard near the bathroom door to grab her phone, to check the time. "You were out thirty-five hours, more or less," she turned and faced him, tucking her hands in her pockets. His back was to her, but he could tell she was watching him.

Zuko had a feeling she could've told him just how many minutes he'd been unconscious too. She'd probably been sat there worrying about him, just like his uncle, for thirty-four hours straight before exhaustion had finally gotten the better of her. He looked over his shoulder with narrowed eyes. "What happened to your arm?" he scoffed, pulling off his black shirt, his voice coming off as if it were her own fault she'd been injured. She guessed that as far as he was concerned, it was.

_"Den- …enise! Ggrh-,"_

He lifted a hand and pressed it into his ear. He didn't hear _fucking _voices in his head. _"Go away. Just fucking **go away.**__"_

If she'd known where she stood with him, she'd have quoted the lyrics to the Elvis Costello song 'Shot With His Own Gun', and made a joke about it, before telling him not to worry about it and that she was just glad he was okay. And she was. She was relieved he was awake, and alert, and unscathed. She just … didn't know how to deal with him right now. "Don't worry about it," she told him in a small, selfless voice.

And she knew he wouldn't. He got to his feet and threw his shirt on the floor, beginning to stalk to the bathroom. He needed a shower, or a bath, or something, though the idea of washing in this hellhole was sickening. He supposed he could wait 'til they got to LA to wash up. He guessed Katara didn't have access to whatever money she had, and that was why they were making do with this cheap shithole on her allowance money. He suddenly felt tired again.

"Wait," she moved into the space between him and the shut bathroom door. "You can't go in there." His swords were soaking in bloody water in there. She hadn't known what to do with them beyond that, but she knew he couldn't let him go in there to see it. She'd been on her knees, scrubbing up blood for hours until she'd allowed herself a chance at sleep, but there was still the blood in the bath to sort out. She held only one arm out to her side to block the path, the injured one straight down against her side.

Zuko stopped and rolled his eyes, before turning away from her, putting his hands on the back of his head, his elbows in the air. "This place is a fucking dump," he complained darkly and groggily. He was right; the place was all different levels of craptastic. He'd puke, but it looked like that had already been done to this room. The curtains looked like vomit on a curtain rod, and the carpet was a shitty green diarrhea color that made everything look like a landfill site.

Katara grabbed a white piece of cloth from the sideboard and expertly pulled it over her neck. She used the good arm to carefully and painlessly get the arm into the sling, before grabbing the pair of keys near where her phone had been. "We can get going if you want," she suggested distastefully, though she wasn't looking forward to being stuck in a car with him. She didn't want to know what had happened between Zuko and Alain Baptiste, god rest his soul, before the bloody death of a writer.

"No," Zuko sighed, "I need to sleep … some more," he felt his eyelids getting heavier, and he sat on the bed. Yet, he felt energy in his body. His head plead for sleep, but his body was restless. He wondered if he would even be able to get sleep right now.

Katara shook her head and approached the bed, where he sat. "You won't sleep," she could've explained more, but she didn't need to, "so do you want to go, or stay a little longer? If you need to get your head together-,"

"Don't baby me," Zuko snapped curtly, "I'm not all tangled up. I've _got _my shit together," he insisted dryly and bitterly.

Katara paused. "I wasn't trying to baby you. I'm … I'm just trying to help." God, when had that lump gotten into her throat?

"Well I don't need your _help_. I'm _fine_," he spat, his eyes fixed on his knees, and where his hands lay on them.

The Marina girl swallowed against the lump in her throat. Did he have to be so cold? Did he really have to be so goddamned, _fucking _cold? What the fuck had she done to him? Why was he … she felt the lump getting bigger … why was he being so hurtful? She tossed the keys back to the sideboard, where they slid across the wood with a scraping noise, before tucking her good hands into the pocket of the pair of jeans she'd packed spare. Blue eyes fixed themselves on where he sat before her.

What _did _he need, then? He wasn't exactly giving her much to work with. She was trying to help him. Couldn't he see that? She'd just _said it, _to his face. How much else could he need? What, was he fucking retarded? She took a long blink. No. She wasn't going to get pissy with him just because he was doing it to her.

Zuko didn't even look up when he next spoke, despite the fact that she was so close to him she could've reached out and caressed his hair; hell, she probably wanted to. She just didn't fucking get it. She thought she was all tough and strong with her guns, but when push came to shove, he'd been the one who had to finish the job, because she'd have probably botched it with her goodwill and fuck-knew-what. "Go get something to eat. Make yourself useful."

Katara breathed a heavy sigh, and in an annoyed tone, answered; "Yes, Massa, whatever you want, Massa, you want champagne with that?" and put her hands on her hips. "Maybe a massage to boot?" she seethed, before scolding herself mentally and stopping at the creepy way he repositioned himself to stare at her.

Zuko tilted his head back to look at her with narrowed eyes. "What?" he strained his voice in incredulity, his lips thinned against one another, ready to prepare a retort.

The younger girl towering over him exhaled and shook her head slowly. "Never mind. Forget it. Sorry." And she turned away from him and stalked to the motel room door. She wondered if she could really blame him for his attitude; if she should just put up with it and hope it would pass. She stopped at the door and glanced over her shoulder at him. He had lifted a hand and was using his thumb and middle finger to squeeze his temples soothingly.

God, if there were only a way he would let her help him.

* * *

><p>Suki had gone about cleaning her room. She had stayed home from school for no reason except that she'd wanted to, but she figured she'd do something constructive. Only Katara could've told you why this was constructive, and if you'd asked Suki, she'd have lied, but Suki had gone about cleaning up, because she had a baby on the way and she needed more space for a crib. She was probably getting ahead of herself, but she was excited. She didn't care, boy or girl, she was already in love with her baby. She needed to call it something other than 'the baby', but she hadn't thought of it yet. She remembered Sokka having told her about a character in a book he was reading, who was pregnant and called her baby 'the chap'.<p>

The phone had been ringing for a minute or two before she'd come out of her daydreams to notice it.

Anyway, as it was, Suki didn't know what sex her baby was, so 'chap' didn't work. She supposed she could call it the 'belly-bug', after hearing about the epic belly-bug shenanigan, but it wasn't a belly-bug, it was a baby. But she still needed to call it/her/him something.

She held a black bin bag of empty beer bottles over her shoulder as she picked up the phone. "Hello?" she asked cheerfully, putting down the bag of beer bottles on the floor.

_"Suki! I've been calling non-stop for thirty minutes! Where the hell were you?" _Aang yelled, half in relief, half in annoyance.

Thirty minutes? Whoops …

"Oh, sorry, guess I got a little carried away," Suki gave a small, guilty laugh. "What's up?"

Aang heaved a long, irritated sigh. _"Uh, the twelve missed calls from you on my cell phone? What's the emergency?" _and then he paused before continuing anxiously, _"Have you heard anything from Katara and Zuko? Have you heard anything about Toph?"_

"Kinda-sorta," Suki replied, and if kinda-sorta was a word, it was probably the one that bothered Aang the most, "Katara called me Sunday night so I could walk her through the ins and outs of driving a car. She didn't tell me what the job was, but she told me it was done, and Zuko was fine, but unconscious. Oh, and they have to go to LA to pick up Toph from the airport. And Katara got shot, but she's okay. Or, at least, she was when I talked to her."

There was a pause on the other end as Aang took this in. He'd already known Zuko had passed out, and that Katara'd been injured, and probably a lot more that Suki didn't know. He wondered if she was even aware what their job the previous weekend had been; if Katara'd told her, or if she'd seen it on the news, or if she was completely uninformed. _"O-…kay … uh, and you haven't heard from them since Sunday night?" _he wondered aloud.

Suki thought on this. It was Tuesday morning. Really, they should've called by now. "No. You?"

_"No. But their job is all over the news. Don't you watch TV?"_

"Not if I can help it. Why? What was it?" she picked up a bottle of coke from her vanity, took a sip, swallowed, and screwed the cap back on. She reached down to grab a potato-chip packet on the carpet and dropped it into the waste-paper basket nearby.

Aang sighed again, his voice hesitant. _"They killed someone; a politics columnist."_

There was a break in the conversation there, so long that Aang was sure Suki had hung up on him. She had thought maybe they would have to … steal something rather expensive, or break someone out of jail, or whatever, but murder? Why would the CIA want them to kill someone for them? Not only did they probably already have black-ops divisions for shit like that, but if they wanted a columnist to stop writing, why not just frame the guy for drugs and get him sent to jail?

_"Suki? Suki, you there?"_

"I-I'm here," she would've smacked herself for stuttering in any other situation. She grabbed up the bag of beer bottles again and continued collecting them from the floor, trying to remain calm and collected; she couldn't freak out, not just yet. "How? How did they do it? Katara didn't-,"

Aang interrupted her. It was probably for the best that he did. _"Zuko did it. The guy's throat was slashed open. I guess Zuko must've fainted not long after the target was dead. Can't really blame the guy though, for fainting. The escape was caught from a news helicopter. They just disappeared into some kind of abyss," _Aang exhaled, and Suki got the feeling he was shaking his head on the other end of the line, _"It's really morbid. Did Katara tell you how they're gonna get to LA?"_

"In a car?" Suki pointed out obviously, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder, dusting off her jewelry box with her hand.

_"Where did they get a car?"_

"Where does the super-criminal best-friend of Toph Bei Fong get a car while in the middle of a getaway?"

Aang sighed. _"She stole one."_

"Bingo. Anyway, I'm going to try calling Katara, and if I can't get through, I'll try Toph. To see what's going on."

_"Alright. Oh, and by the way, Sokka's looking for you."_

Suki stopped what she was doing, dropped the bag of beer bottles on the floor, and held her drink tighter. "What? Why? When did you see him?"

_"This morning; he stopped by, thinking you were here. He said something about a Dylan Green, or a Dylan Gecko, or something like that …"_

The face Suki pulled was almost comical. It would've been fucking hilarious if not for the terrifying gravity of the situation. If Sokka knew about Greco … what else did he know about? If he was coming here, was she able to keep her fucking mouth shut? Would even that be enough to keep the puke-inducing child in her belly a secret? "Oh, **shit**," she cursed, "alright, thanks for the heads-up, Aang-,"

And then there was a knock on the door downstairs.

Oh shit, indeed.

_"I heard that. You'd better go answer the door."_

Suki groaned. "Alright. Bye, Aang." She put the phone back in its cradle and sighed, putting a hand to her swollen tummy with a slight sigh. The door was being pounded mercilessly. She ran her thumb over the curve of her tummy for a moment, allowing herself a second to appreciate the life growing there, before shaking her head. "Alright, Cookie. Let's go deal with your deadbeat daddy."

Cookie. And thus, the nickname was set.

* * *

><p><em>"Sunday night's murder has the east-side of Dahlia Coast's urban sections in a restless, anxious unease, with shop owners paying thousands for new security hardware and hired guns like bounty-hunter June Chomana to protect their stores. Miss Chomana, an interview please?"<em>

_"Alright, but make it quick; I'm working. What do you want?"_

_"What's your take on the murder of Alain Baptiste? Do you think these people have reason to worry, or was it just a one-off?"_

_"My take? I don't have a take. I'm Switzerland. I have no opinion."_

_"Surely you have **something **__to say on the tragedy-,"_

_"Look, the guy died, and it's a real shame, but all I know is, for ex-cons like me, it's good for business. Personally, I feel bad for the Blue Spirit."_

_"… Excuse me?"_

_"Never mind. Go bother someone else …"_

_"Well, back to you, Dorothy."_

_"Thanks, Dean. And now, in the Science realm of the world today, a strange herd of bovine creatures believed to have roamed earth in the late Triassic era were spotted in the Tibetan mountain range in the small hours of Monday morning. Japanese geneticist Dr. Akio Kagayama is with us today to discuss. Dr. Kagayama?"_

Katherine Roberts froze and turned to face the television in the corner of her lab, dropping what she had been doing.

_"Thank you; could you roll the footage so I can … ?"_

_"Of course."_

A film clip came up on the screen and stopped in freeze-frame with a blurry image of some whitish animals with brown, nondescript patters on their spines moving to higher ground on a snow-capped mountain, probably away from whoever was taking the film of them. The animals were extremely large; twice as tall as the tallest man, and the width of four to six fat horses. The largest one had to be at least the length of two cars. Katherine grabbed her phone from the counter and dialed a number she knew off by heart.

_"As you can see, these bison-like creatures have tails resembling those of platypuses, for a purpose we have yet to determine, and the horns are similar to those of Texas Longhorn cattle, so we can assume quite safely that the animal is probably an ancestor of modern cows, though scientists like myself prefer not to assume. Now, cows have four stomachs, but it looks to me like this animal has closer to six or seven stomachs, by its body weight. The animal is likely to be the world's largest land-mammal, breaking the record of the African Bush Elephant-,"_

Dr. Roberts turned off the TV so she could talk on the phone. This was the third now. The third animal that could be part of the allele she was studying. And there were four. That was Earth, Fire, and she guessed this bovine animal for Air. Just one left. They were all coming to the light _now_. As if it were destiny, or a thing called 'Ka' that she knew nothing about.

"This is Dr. Katherine Roberts. I'm placing a pre-order on the fibers of the Tibetan Bison creatures for Cures USA in Dahlia Coast."

_"We don't do pre-orders, Dr. Roberts-,"_

"I don't care. Just send some as soon as you get some."

* * *

><p>Eventually, Katara had tidied the bathroom to the point that it was cleaner than it had been when she'd rented the room, and the smell of blood and sweat was replaced by the smell of lemon-blossom cleaning fluid, and sorted out Zuko's swords so they could bathe. But not together. Even though she'd imagined 'gettin'-it-awn' with Zuko in the shower a few times before, she had a feeling he didn't want to be near her today.<p>

Besides. The boy in the next room, in the bath, wasn't Zuko. He was some kind of empty shell of Zuko.

When she'd caught a pair of eyes looking into the room while she changed, she was in the doorway in a flash, staring down a boy of about twelve or thirteen years old, hands on the hips of her jeans, topless besides her bra. She could remember the terrified look on the younger boy's face, and gave a little laugh; examining the peace offering the boy had given her, before running away.

"You want to take a look? Go ahead, have a fucking look, you dickless little sack of shit," she remembered having told the kid, recalling patting the holsters on her thighs threateningly. "If you really want a bullet between your eyes _that _badly," she'd added coldly. No, she wouldn't have shot the kid.

But the kid didn't know that.

Sure, it was dangerous. It was also the first time Katara Marina - who was very different to the Painted Lady - had been seen carrying guns. Besides, that kid probably was too scared and busy wiping shit out of his pants to tell anyone. And so what if he'd seen a girl with shaggy, auburn hair that may or may not have resembled the Painted Lady? That didn't point to Katara Marina, the identity she needed to protect.

Anyway, Katara ended up sitting on the floor with her back to the bed, holding a reefer between her forefinger and middle finger, turning her hand to inspect it, deciding what to do with the one of many the boy had offered her in recompense for the ways of the peeping-tom. She knew for fact that Zuko had a lighter somewhere, in one of his pockets, and she didn't have to get stoned; she'd just get a little bit happy. She'd never tried marijuana before, but she'd heard good things about it.

So, she grabbed Zuko's jacket from the bed, checked the pockets and found a pack of cigarettes, a set of keys, a money clip, and bingo, there it was; a lighter. She would've paused, but by that time, she'd already decided she needed some me-time, so she lit up and put the cigarette to her lips, drew in a long breath of it and then coughed out. Holy **shit, **that was strong stuff.

She sat there, smoking it for a while, getting used to the in-out system of smoking, and wondering if she looked as cool with this as Mai Tamesis did with her Benson & Hedges cigarettes, leaning beside the main door of the school and glaring at random people to scare the shit out of them. She really didn't deserve this, she mused to herself pensively, to be treated like some kind of whore.

And she was being treated like such.

He was treating her like she owed him all this; all her kindness. Really, if she'd left him there because she was bleeding to the point where doctors would've begun to lose hope for her, people would've understood. She hadn't had to drag his ass out of there. She could've left him there to sort himself out. Whatever she _did _owe him was owed to the old Zuko; the one who'd loved her in return. Right now her love was unrequited, because, and solely because, he was unable to feel anything for her, and the world, bar for hate.

The realization hit her like a tidal wave. He hated her. He just couldn't see that there was still good in the world anymore. And she recognized that. It was what she had felt after her mother's death. A deep, unfathomable depression had consumed her in darkness; cold, empty darkness. Whatever emotion she'd been able to conjure up in her heart had been hate and anger and sadness, until finally she hadn't wanted to feel anything anymore. And so she'd tried to kill herself; because she didn't want to go on like that.

Zuko was depressed, and she couldn't remember how she'd gotten out of that last time.

Oh, yeah. She'd been shot.

Katara laughed, once, the humor lost on her, before snuffing out her reefer on the rubber bottom of one of her hiking boots and tucking it into her pocket with the rest of them. When she got to LA, she'd get high with Toph to laugh away the bullshit of these sleepless days spent hovering worriedly over him. Ungrateful fucking bastard. Damn, she was beginning to hate him back. When she heard the bathroom door opening, she got up and raised an eyebrow at him, biting her tongue to keep from biting her lip.

By damn, he was still hot without a shirt on, ungrateful bastard that he was.

* * *

><p>"Is it true?" Sokka snapped suddenly, tucking his hands into his pockets the second the door was shut, muffling their voices from the neighbors. "Did you <em>fuck <em>that chickenshit sonovabitch Greco?" his brows came down hard and his lips thinned against one another in a cold, hard glare.

Suki crossed her arms and gave a long, casual blink. "So what if I did? We're not together anymore," he pointed out blithely, "and it was _fine _for you to screw Yue Chander behind my back when we _were _together, wasn't it?" she consciously had to make an effort to keep the Cookie a secret from him. Cookie was for her and Auntie Katara only. At least for now, until Toph was home. She guessed it was a kind of girls-only thing, because you had to be a girl to _get _this kind of thing.

Sokka groaned and turned his back to her. "So you went and fucked that guy? Seriously, Suki, of _all _the people you could screw, you picked the one guy who was only doing it to be a dick to me? I mean, you _say _you're the bigger person between us, but that's just-,"

"Oh, come on, Sokka; it was like, _twice. _And I stress the point that you and I are _over. _You don't get a say in who I fuck, alright?" she uncrossed he arms and put her hands on her hips, unconsciously slipping a finger into the groove between where her t-shirt ended and her jeans began, still in awe of the smooth swell of her tummy. She couldn't believe she hadn't noticed it growing.

Sokka turned and stared at her. "What? Twice?" he screeched immaturely, "Why? When? **Why**?" he sputtered miserably.

Suki ignored his questions. "Well, twice if you count the second time. It was like, one minute, and then I told him to get the fuck out, 'cause he's fucking useless. So let's say once …" she trailed off at the amused look growing on Sokka's face. "What?"

Sokka laughed, once. "You actually said that to him?"

"Well, yeah, but that's not the point."

Sokka chuckled this time, mirthfully and humored, putting his back to the wall, lifting a hand and pinching the bridge of his nose as he chortled away. "You actually … told him … he was fucking useless?" he spoke between chuckles, obviously finding this very amusing. Suki didn't find this at all funny.

"Jesus Christ, Sokka, I thought you were mad at me," she tried to force down the smirk growing at the corner of her mouth. "You came here to shoot off your mouth, and now you're laughing."

Sokka shook his head and smiled at her, still chuckling. "Nah. I'm not mad at you anymore. I just wish I could've seen the look on the guy's face when you told him he didn't 'do it for you'," he explained reasonably, further amusing himself with a Spaceballs quote.

Suki nodded slowly and smiled back. "Yeah. He doesn't 'do it for me'. I'm hungry. Lunch?" she suggested amicably.

"How about brunch? Bacon and Eggs?"

"No. You're getting tubby without me to watch your weight for you," she poked him in the stomach, turned and stalked into the kitchen. "Chicken, bacon, mushroom, tomato and lettuce Caesar Salad. Take it or leave it."

Sokka sighed. Well, it was food all the same, and she made a mean salad to boot. He decided he'd better not tell her _she _was getting a little soft herself, otherwise he'd get a foot in his mouth before he got a fork into it. He was pleasantly surprised when his ex-girlfriend had an appetite that rivaled his own while they were eating, and even before, while she'd been preparing the salad; she'd been stealing little bits of chicken and bacon while chopping it up, and sneaking small amounts of Caesar sauce into her mouth via pinky-finger.

But Sokka said nothing, probably because he was thinking about her strange new appetite.

* * *

><p>Somehow Katara managed to drive and sift through the CD's in the dashboard at the same time, maintaining a steady speed of 60mph on the highway. The scenery out to the sea was attractive, sure, but nowhere near as attractive of something to distract her from the bored look on Zuko's face as he sat in the passenger seat, a corner of his forehead pressed to the glass of the window, a cigarette held loosely between his lips, looking both catatonic and hateful.<p>

The last car she'd stolen, back in Dahlia Coast, had been an old piece of shit with CD's of oldies like 'Time After Time' by Cyndi Lauper, 'In The Air Tonight' by Phil Collins, 'Take Me On' by A-Ha, 'Young Turks' by Rod Stewart, and many other songs that had done their best to keep Katara distracted from the pain in her arm and the unconscious boy sprawled on the back seat as she drove along the highway.

This car, however, was a nicer car; a sleek, white Ford Taurus sedan she'd found parked behind the Motel, near what she assumed was a sneak-out door. Nobody would've realized it was gone until they were ten miles up the highway. Oddly enough, the man whose license and registration documents were in the car looked like he could resemble her father, so she supposed even if they did get stopped by a cop, she could say it was her father's car and she had permission to be driving it.

"Why you needed to steal _another _car is beyond me," Zuko murmured in annoyance from his seat.

Katara tried her best to ignore him, and discarded the last of the crappy screamer-Goth-horror-kill-myself-thrasher rock CD's into the back seat and turned on the radio. A pleasant-sounding country song was on, but she wasn't really one for ballads. Especially not now. She wasn't in the mood for those break-up songs right now; she wanted something uplifting. But something made her stop. There was something familiar about the song.

_'You look so peaceful sleeping, you don't know that I'm leaving, but I'm gone …'_

Katara tried to place where she'd heard it before.

'_I did my best to beat em', but in my head the demons said move on.'_

She supposed she may have just heard a song like it before, and it wasn't necessarily this particular song.

_'When you wake up you're gonna curse my name, as some time goes by I hope and pray …'_

The next lyric just popped into Katara's head from her subconscious, the way you recall certain things when re-reading a book you know from cover to cover. She knew the song. She knew it from somewhere - where the fuck had she heard it before? She sang along to the chorus under her breath, somehow knowing the lyrics of that bit, and bringing Zuko to shoot her a dirty glance.

_'When you think of me, remember the way that I used to be; remember the times I held you tenderly, remember the way that I love you …'_

Katara returned to silence, listening to the lyrics and driving along the road, still trying to figure out where she'd heard the damn song before. She remembered her mother had liked country music; she'd had a whole collection of Reba McIntire, Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton and Shanaia Twain tapes hidden in a shoebox under her bed that Katara had once gotten into. She tried to remember what Garth Brooks sounded like; she wondered if the guy singing this song was that guy.

_'I think about the night I met you, I swore I'd never forget you, well, I won't.'_

Then Katara remembered her mother humming it once while driving her to school after a dentist appointment, with headphones on her ears and a small smile on her face. Katara was always pleasantly affected when small little memories like these came back to her; especially the ones of her mother. That time, she remembered, her mother had first been humming, and then broke out into sing-along mode with the chorus, and Katara had just sat there, smiling at her musical mother.

_'I think about the way you'll live and breathe, inside my dreams forever; you'll be better when I'm gone, you'll be better when I'm gone … Cause I know you're gonna fall in love again; I'm sorry this is how it has to end …' _

"But when you think of me," Katara sang in nostalgia, "remember the way that I used to be … remember the times I held you tenderly … remember the way that I love you …"

She stopped singing when Zuko let out a groan of annoyance. "Turn that shit off!" he demanded in annoyance, lifting his leg and thumping his sneaker down on the dashboard. The radio skipped out for a moment before continuing as a result of his kicking the console. The voice of that damned country singer continued in its melodic little ditty, further annoying him.

Katara glanced at him in surprise. Jesus Fucking Christ, what was his problem? Alright, fine. No fucking music. She turned off the radio and sighed, catching the sun's glimmer on the sea out the window in her peripheral vision. Her shrink probably would've told her to give him some space. She'd have done that if she weren't stuck in a fucking car with him.

* * *

><p>Katara went into the airport to get Toph, having received an email message from Toph's laptop that she had landed and didn't have any luggage to collect. Zuko stayed in the car, thankfully. The older girl waited at the back of a crowd of people waiting for their friends and family deplaning, until she saw Toph pushing through the crowd toward her friend. They hugged briefly before Toph said 'nice wig', and then told Katara they should get moving.<p>

"Why? What's wrong?" Katara inquired, the both of them walking away from the other passengers from Toph's plane, towards the main doors of the large airport.

Toph patted her laptop on her hip as it hung in its bag from her shoulder. "I botched up their decryptions to get back at them. I wasn't supervised on the plane, but I'd bet my CPU that they planted some agents on the plane to jump us if anything goes on the fritz. Why are you even here to pick me up? You know I'm smart enough to get a cab."

Katara frowned wanly. "The CIA told me the plans had changed. They said they would only hand you over to us. I assumed it was just a security thing, but you're unguarded. There's nobody handing you over at all …" she thought aloud. Why did they want her at the airport? They obviously weren't trying to do a deal, otherwise they'd have brought Toph to her and then threatened to kill her, or some shit like that. Then she realized why the CIA had planted people on Toph's plane.

To track them.

The CIA wanted to know who The Painted Lady and The Blue Spirit were, now that they'd gotten one good job out of them. They were blackmail-able, and they did a job if they thought their people were at risk. But Toph wouldn't fall for it again, so they needed to know who else was with them; who else they'd protect. The CIA wanted to know their weak points. They wanted to know who they were, where they were, and what made them tick.

They had two choices - lose the tail, or give them an inaccurate portrayal of who they were. Katara opted for the first; probably because losing the cops on Sunday night had gone so well. She leant closer to Toph and told her friend to just follow her lead. The two moved towards the nearest women's bathroom. Once the door was shut, Katara whipped out the F-001 device, just to be sure there were no cameras nearby.

Toph caught on to what Katara was thinking not long after the blinking red light on the security camera in the corner went out. "You think they want to tail us?" she assumed correctly, lifting a hand and pressing her fingertip to the nose ring now living in the piercing in her left nostril, just to be sure it was still there.

"That's exactly what I think. We need to shake the tail. Any ideas?" Katara leant against the counter of the bathroom and crossed her bare arms over her chest, painful as it was to do so. She'd left her makeshift sling in the motel room; she needed her left arm. She couldn't just put an 'out of order' sign on it and let it heal. If it hurt to do stuff, so it would be, but she needed her left arm.

Toph shut her eyes and lifted her brows high under her bangs. "We need to look different, for starters. And you could do with texting Zuko to bring a car around for a speedy escape."

Katara shook her head. "That's not going to work. Zuko's not a team player right now. He's … out of order," she frowned mildly, reminding herself both that she wore her guns under the long jacket she'd found in the trunk of the Taurus, and not to accidentally shoot herself. "He's dead weight, much as I hate to say it."

Toph nodded at this. "Shoulda guessed it," she sighed, "Alright; what do we have in our favor?"

"Disguise, crowds and cover. They're not going to shoot at us unless they're sure we know they're tailing us, and that they're not going to catch civilians in the crossfire. I say we change our appearances, move with the crowds, and get around corners to break their line of sight. You game?" Katara managed a smirk.

Toph smirked too, reaching up and untying her status-quo, messy up-do hairstyle and raking her fingers through it before entwining her hair into a loose braid that she'd often seen on Katara. "I'm game. We'd better switch up then. You're already wearing a wig, how else can you change your looks?"

Katara took off the wig, revealing her hair to be pinned against her scalp with a number of flat, slider hairclips. She scrutinized the auburn wig in her hands and drew a scissors from the pocket of the coat she wore, beginning to snip away at the fake hair. She also drew out two pairs of sunglasses, one of which she had meant for Zuko, but she hadn't offered them to him, for fear of his crankiness.

Toph pulled off her jacket and tied it around her waist. She wouldn't leave this jacket behind, even for her safety; she liked it too much. It was a brown leather jacket that went great with the green t-shirt she wore underneath, as it did with most of her other clothes. "So, Katara; didn't you have to go through security to get here? How'd you get by with your guns _and _a scissors?"

Katara rolled her eyes, still snipping the wig into a short boy-cut style. "A girl has her ways."

"Do those ways include seducing security guards?"

"No. Just distracting them," Katara smiled amicably at her friend and pulled the wig over her head with one hand, tucking her scissors back into her pocket with the other, "Come on. We need to get out of here," and she turned off the fritzonator. "I'll go out first, and then you come out after a minute or so. They'll be looking for two girls, not one," she put on her sunglasses and turned to leave the bathroom.

Toph watched her friend leave the room and wondered, just briefly, how Katara managed to keep a brave face the way she did. Toph supposed someone had to hold the balance; be the braces holding the world from caving in, but to always be those braces … to _always _hold up the world … Toph shook it off. She didn't get all philosophical about shit like this. She just hoped - for Zuko's sake - that he was showing Katara some goddamned fucking appreciated for all she'd done for him.

And if he wasn't, there'd be hell to pay.

* * *

><p>It was nine at night by the time Katara was settled enough in the hotel room to take off her wig and disrobe to nothing but some comfortable leggings and a camisole. Toph had already fallen asleep face-first in a pillow on one of the beds in the room, presumably because she hadn't slept in five days, and Zuko was doing miserable mopey things in his separate hotel room, she guessed.<p>

Katara stared at herself in the mirror, unclipping her hair and taking in her reflection. With a heavy sigh, she looked down into the sink and grimaced. She wished to god she could help Zuko in some way. If he would only let her in, if he would only listen to her … but, she realized grimly, he was lost inside his own mind, away from the real world; trapped in depression and apathy.

She watched her reflection before her and thought of him, willing a smile to come to her face at the thought of him. No smile came; just stress. She wanted to talk to him. To try to set things right, even if she knew deep down that it would get her nowhere, and would only further frustrate him. She turned out of the bathroom in the five-star hotel room (paid for with counterfeit money Katara hadn't asked where Toph had gotten) and approached the door out into the hallway.

Katara let herself into Zuko's room with a spare key they'd been issued, only to see that Zuko was deep in sleep on his side in the large double bed. She closed the door quietly and pressed her back to it, watching him for a moment, unaware he had faked asleep to not have to talk to her. The rhythmic inflation and deflation of his bare chest as he 'slept' was mesmerizing - almost therapeutically so. She wondered, as she took a sheepish step closer, how his emotions could be so turbulent and still allow him to sleep.

She knew she would _never_ get to sleep tonight.

Katara approached the bed with slow, uncertain steps on the carpet that mimicked those of a child approaching a dead body. She licked her dry lips as she got closer, until she was close enough to reach out and touch him. She turned and sank, slowly, to sit beside his 'sleeping' form, ever careful not to wake him. She didn't sense his annoyance as she got closer; the way his entire body tensed at the almost unnoticeable way her skin touched his.

She tried her best not to touch him, but it was unavoidable. Being near him now felt like standing near a raging fire; one little flash could burn and scar. Hesitantly, she lifted a hand over his head. Zuko froze, trying his best to decipher what she was doing without opening his eyes. She sighed heavily and slipped her fingers into his hair, caressing and pushing it back lovingly.

"Oh, fuck, Zuko …" he heard her whisper on a breath. She sounded like she wanted to say more, but there was nothing else she could think to say. "Zuko," she repeated his name, and this time it sounded like she was smiling fondly. Zuko would've given anything to know what she was thinking in that moment. He stayed still, irritated with her presence, but not with the gentle caress of her hand in his hair. It was a most peculiar feeling to have.

Although he was unaware what was going through her head, it was quite clear to her. She remembered something, from a while ago, not nearly as far back as the song on the radio and her mother in the car, but it was a while ago just the same. _'Well, I'm sorry if I've __offended __you, _**_Prince_**_ Zuko the _**_evil spawn,_**_' _she remembered snapping at him in annoyance, after the incident at her house, when her father had thought they'd done the nasty-nasty.

"Prince Zuko, the evil spawn," she murmured nostalgically, and pushed some of his hair away from his scar. She examined the scar curiously, with a gentle fingertip, tracing the tissue gingerly and carefully. She shook her head slowly, as if wanting to throw her head into her hands and cry forever. "You don't deserve this," she whispered to his sleeping form, and then chuckled dryly, "_any _of this," she added pensively.

Zuko silently agreed. He stayed motionless, muscles still tensed at her presence.

Katara looked away from him, her thumb keeping its place on his tender scar, her bright blue eyes looking about the room. The room was nice, she supposed, but in the dark it just reminded her of Alain Baptiste's bloody apartment. She frowned, wanly and grimly, eyes glinting in what little light there was in the room. She returned her gaze to Zuko, who slept peacefully before her. She wondered how he could look so peaceful, and be so turbulent.

She argued with herself, but eventually gave into temptation and leant down to him. He tensed even more, careful that she didn't notice, as she pressed a chaste, loving, tender kiss to the hollow of his scarred temple. At first he didn't understand. He had been rude, curt, cruel, mean and a number of variations of each word to her since he'd woken up today, and yet she kissed him, in an act of what he could only see as love, through his veil of depression and hate.

Her lips were soft on his scar tissue, and he felt his muscles relaxing against his will at her kiss. She pulled away, and he guessed immediately she was chastising herself for doing that. He imagined her doing that cute little self-scolding thing she did to herself when she knew she was in the wrong. He cursed himself first, and then he cursed her, for making him think of her in good terms. He was angry at her. Zuko couldn't have told you why he was angry at her, he just was.

And it wasn't up to her to change that.

But still, her kiss was comforting. He briefly realized all the things she had done for him, even in his long, opaque spell of black hatred for her. She had saved his _life. _She had sat for a whole day by his bedside to be sure she was there when he woke. She had put his wellbeing before his, even when she was wounded. He had vowed once to himself never to let her feel pain, and he had done nothing in the past twelve hours but cause her such.

She disappeared from his reach the instant he'd almost wanted her to stay, and he heard the door click shut behind her, before he opened his eyes and stared at the door. Eventually, Zuko Scorsese rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, at odds as to where he was going, unsure whether being with Katara was the best for him or her right now. She had fallen in love with the human Zuko, a man who could never have taken a life. A man who was lost now. She was unsure whether that man would ever return.

Zuko groaned and shut his eyes again, just as unable as Katara to fall asleep.

* * *

><p>Aang tossed in his restless sleep. Toph had called to tell him she was fine, and was staying in LA for the night to catch some sleep. He should've been relieved; calmed. Somehow, Toph's safety had done nothing to soothe him. Suffice to say, it wasn't Toph's kidnapping that had him stressed. It was bad, and he knew it, but it wasn't the worst thing on his mind right now. After talking to Suki earlier, he'd received an unsettling phone call.<p>

"Hello?"

_"Good afternoon, Aang Tyson. That is your new last name, isn't it Aang?"_

Aang had paused to looked around to see if he was being followed. "How did you get this number? How did you find me?"

The person on the other end had laughed. _"You've been running away from your destiny, Avatar. Rise to it. The world is in peril. Only you can save it."_

"You people are fucking nuts. I don't care if the world is spinning on somebody's finger, there's no way I'm coming back to you psychos. You and your kind killed my people."

Another unsettling chuckle. _"Oh, no, Aang … we didn't kill them. The killed themselves. When they hid you. But all of this is old news, isn't it? How is America? How are you enjoying the twenty-first century? You know, it was rather ingenious how you fooled social services, and national security, and a variety of other organizations, to get away from us. I'm rather impressed. Though I do wonder if you enjoy forsaking your dead parents, who placed you with the monastery for your safety, and the monks who died protecting the world's last hope for peace …"_

"Yeah, well, like you say; it was a millennia ago," Aang had retorted darkly, "and you forget who sent soldiers to wipe out the temples."

_"No good deed shall go unpunished, Avatar Aang. You were frozen for a reason. Destiny will bring the traditions of the bending arts back to the world, and with it, chaos will take over. Firebenders will seek domination of the world, just as they did a thousand years ago, and the Airbenders are already on the brink of extinction, activated or not."_

Aang remembered grimacing at this. "How do you plan to activate them again?"

_"Oh, it isn't us, young Avatar. No, no. A geneticist has found three of the four genetic combinations of the arts of bending. Once they find the fourth, in this case, Water, the scientist will begin to search for a way to re-activate the abilities. When they do, they will test it on an unsuspecting loved one - for the noble sake of science, of course - and the danger of the art will make itself apparent. In a hurry to destroy the concentrated activation toxin the scientist will have composed, they will run to their lab and open their freezer … only to realize the toxin has been stolen, and is to be released on the world."_

Aang had ground his teeth and squeezed the phone in his grip. "You're planning to steal it," he'd assumed wisely.

_"No. Someone like us, but not us. A young anarchist, conspiring with … no, actually, puppeteering is a better word for it; puppeteering another for the purpose of chaos. Really, it's quite brilliant. I only wish we **had **__been a part of it."_

"What are you talking about? It hasn't even happened yet! Tell me who this scientist is so I can stop this before-,"

_"The Elements are to be restored, but to exist in a balanced world. It is your duty to bring such balance - not to change fate."_

"Wait! This isn't-,"

But the line had gone dead.

Aang eventually abandoned his fitful sleep to pace, and try to exhaust himself to the point that a heavier sleep was inevitable. The very fabric of the earth could be threatened if he didn't step up. Maybe it really was time to stop running. Aang shook this away. There had to be some kind of way to stop the elements from being reactivated; that kind of power was dangerous. Sure, it had been sustainable in his time, but that had been a long time ago, not long after the world's first 'Y2K-2012' panic.

Aang sighed and lifted a hand to his face, rubbing his brow tiredly, memories hitting him like a ton of bricks. He regretted that he couldn't remember what his real parents looked like, but he'd known they'd been devoted to the wellbeing of the world; they had sent him to the monks in Tibet as soon as they'd realized who he was - _what _he was. They'd sent him to learn from the monks, from their tranquility and non-violence, when he'd only been two years old. And then when he'd been eleven - and it really was a much longer story than his summary - he'd been preserved in the Avatar state, specifically to return in the year 2009.

Back then, Tibet had been called something different. The Eastern Air Temple Territories in the Earth Kingdom, north of Ba Sing Se. On waking up in 2008 due to some undersea explorers happening upon his temporary tomb, Aang had noted that the maps had to have been a lot less accurate in his time. A lot had changed. He'd been in awe of the whole world for the first year or two after his awakening. Everything had changed. There had been hybrid animals in his time, like cat-penguins to penguin-sled on.

But, that was a long time ago, and now the most fun sledding there was happened to be called 'backpack sledding', which was fun, but not as much as penguin sledding. His own time was a time Aang cared not to return to. The Avatar collapsed to his bed and stared at the ceiling for a short while. Whoever was going to release hell on the world needed to be stopped, and he had no idea where to start looking for this person. In his time he could've just found someone with a shirshu to find a person, but the world had moved on since then.

Roland would've understood.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: There is little to no filler in that last bit with Aang. It's all substance, which really niggles me. I usually fill up a lot of my story with pointless bullshit. Because I live on planet bullshit in the galaxy of 'this sucks camel dicks'. I have no idea what that quote is from. I just remember it. Anyway, Toph is safe, bending will come soon, and er, yeah, just sit back and enjoy the ride. I'm guessing you all know who our young anarchist is.**

**^_^ I miss writing Aidan. Can't wait for the next chapter. He's gonna bother Katara some.**

**Dare you all to guess between these seven character descriptions who (spellchecker wants me to write 'whom' but fuck that) Aidan's puppet will be!**

**A) Slugger; one of Aidan's demonic trio, an effectively emancipated ex-juvie-con.**

**B) Lydia Roberts; the green eyed, uppity, British daughter of Dr. Katherine Roberts.**

**C) Zuko Scorsese; the jaded, scarred and confused Blue Spirit.**

**D) Dominic Roberts; Dr. Katherine Roberts' husband on an expedition in Egypt.**

**E) Katara Marina; the well-meaning and serene Painted Lady.**

**F) Prudence Donovan; the substitute-turned-english-teacher whose job is at stake.**

**G) Dr. Kelly Glassman; a psychiatrist working with the CBI and FBI to catch murderers and rapists.**

**When did we start playing Cluedo?**

**Reviews, reviews, let's hear the news, just remember I love all of yews … :3 I love rhymes, but they're forbidden. Forbidden? Forbidden Schmershmidden! But seriously, y'all. Review!**


	17. It Pisses Them Off

Zuko and Katara returned with Toph on Wednesday, and they were all back in school by Thursday morning, 8am; the status quo for all high school students. The car ride had been tense, with Zuko not talking to anyone, Toph talking to Katara, and Katara trying to listen to the radio as long as she could before Zuko told her to turn it off. They'd dumped the Taurus just off the highway and hitch-hiked back to town in the back of some guy's pick-up truck, much to Zuko's dismay, and had gotten home in time for dinner. Katara hadn't spoken to Zuko since then.

Come to think of it, Katara mused, doodling on the side of the page in her English book, she really hadn't _spoken _to him since Sunday morning. She had briefly snapped at him, maybe once after the initial 'yes, Massa' thing on the highway, but he wasn't taking it to heart. He probably didn't give a shit what she said or thought by now, anyway. Katara continued to doodle in her book, sitting at a table in the library.

Ordinarily, she'd be hanging with her pals on first break time, but she hadn't wanted to run into Zuko. And, she'd forgotten her Dark Tower book at home that morning, so Yeah, she was doodling; because it was better than sitting around doing fuck all. Though, eventually, she leant back in boredom and blew a breath at the ceiling, her doodle book forgotten.

Things got interesting again when a backpack slumped down on the table in front of her, jarring her out of her daze. She jumped, staring at the backpack, before registering the boy standing behind it. Oh great. Aidan. At the way he groaned in annoyance, he smirked and put the heels of his hands on the table, leaning towards her.

"Morning."

Katara shook her head. "Why are you bothering me?" she asked, in the most humble of ways, just trying to get a straight answer. Zuko had been running her in loops, to the point that she really just wanted a chat to _just be _a _chat. _No 'deeper meaning', no 'bigger picture', just a 'hi, hello, nice to see ya' deal.

Aidan shrugged calmly and amicably. "Unlike most people in this fucking school, you're not completely insufferable," he straightened his back on the other side of the table. Katara had to agree with one thing; most of the girls here were just fucking _irritating. _You wouldn't want to have to talk to them, even to tell them their house was on fire. How he could tell the different between her and them interested Katara.

With a pause, the corner of Katara's mouth twitched up. "And you … read people? For fun?" she queried curiously, hiding her wariness from him. She wondered if that was how he'd played it with Noah; if he'd called him 'friend' and whispered 'suicide' in his ear while he slept. If he'd told the kid about the chest needle, just as a _friendly_ _suggestion_.

Zuko had told her not to talk to him, but he was being nice to her, and that was more than she could say for the evil spawn himself. Besides. She wanted to know him a little bit; to be able to tell when he was going to strike. She wanted to be prepared, because rest assured he would lash out at the world again, and someone had to know when that was going to happen.

Aidan smiled briefly, charmed by her question. "Fun, amusement, entertainment, it's all the same. What happened to your Stephen King book?" he raised an eyebrow, lifted a hand and poked a finger at his lip ring; to be sure it was still there. It was a habit a person gained when they got a piercing, and it couldn't be helped. She was strange. He usually told women they were different from the rest, but he hated to admit that this one really was. How, he was unsure, though he would find out eventually.

Katara shrugged as best she could while sitting down. "Finished it. Reading the next one. Left it at home," she explained concisely, not stringing her sentences long enough to start a conversation. If a conversation started, she knew he'd get sucked into his ill-meaning charm and unconventional mystery. He was attractive, in the same way that Zuko was. Maybe even as attractive. He was dark and mysterious. He didn't really appeal to her though, the way Zuko did. She couldn't explain it.

Aidan strolled around the table and leant against it, beside her, reaching behind him and unzipping his backpack. He drew out something pink and extended it to her. She eyed the sweater, and then him. His smirk grew, as he pinpointed the exact moment where her calm façade fell apart. She remembered giving it to that little boy in the rain on Saturday night. "Thought you might want your sweater back," he smirked gleefully, a self-satisfied, gloating look on his face as if he had her _panties _instead of her sweater.

Katara glared at him with cold and angry eyes. "I _don't_ want it back. I can't believe you took it away from that kid," she critiqued breathily, pushing her seat back and getting to her feet. She supposed she shouldn't really have been surprised. And on the bright side, she knew more about him, and knowledge was power. She put her hands on her hips and stared him down indignantly. She noticed the way his gray-green eyes glinted at the prospect of conflict.

He was playing her. He just wanted to know which buttons to push.

Aidan shook his head and pulled the most sincere smile he could fake. "That kid happens to be my kid brother," he explained calmly and coolly, the ghost of a smirk wanting to erupt behind the smile, "he lives with me, for the most part. And he has plenty of sweaters. So here - take it," he extended it again, and when she looked away as if ignoring him, he reached out with his free hand and touched her bare elbow to get her attention.

A tingling chill shot down Katara's spine at his touch. It was like an electric shock. Katara jerked her arm away from him and took a step back, her gaze locked with his. She was still for a moment, her mouth dry and the cogs on her mind working to piece together how that kind of shock was plausible. She shook her head and gave him a cold, polite smile. "Give it back to him. Or throw it away. I don't want it back."

And she collected her things and fled as fast as she could.

Aidan smirked and watched her flee.

* * *

><p>Zuko stared into his locker and smirked to himself. He had been in a rather good mood today. He'd called the bank to find out just how much he'd accumulated from his allowance and his tendency not to spend it, and his funds were rising close to twenty grand. Had it really been that long since he'd bought something just because he wanted it? The last time he'd spent like that had been when he'd gotten the bike.<p>

He'd had an old Harley from Lu Ten before that.

Money was good. Money was power. The CIA was proof of that.

"Hey, Zuko!" he heard a familiar voice, bouncing with the force of heavy running steps.

Zuko turned his head and saw Suki Kyoshi jogging up to him with a humored smile on her face. He remembered Katara telling him about her 'situation', on Saturday night, albeit with a lot of chuckling involved. Zuko shut his locker, his smirk growing to a genuine smile. "Should you be running like that?" he teased lightly, careful not to touch on the subject too much. Gossip spread here like disease.

Suki smiled back, a pink flush on her face showing how excited and happy she was over the 'situation'. She was practically glowing. "So Katara told you about that, huh?" she slowed to a halt before him, reaching up and rubbing the back of her neck, under her sort ponytail; she'd just gotten out of Gym class, where they were doing Yoga.

Zuko put a hand on her back, and began to walk alongside her, his bag swaying heavily on his other shoulder. "Yeah, Katara told me about that. I'm guessing you decided-,"

Suki laughed at this. "Yeah. Katara was big on talking about options and stuff," she rolled her eyes and put a hand on her tummy, which was still rather flat, though curved, "but it's me and the Cookie from here on out …" she trailed off fondly, taking her hand from her belly to avoid anyone noticing. Zuko heard the aforementioned tummy growling for food.

Zuko laughed, once. "Cookie. That's what you're calling it?"

Suki shrugged. "Well, it's better than _evil spawn._ Which, by the way, is what Katara's been calling you all day," she then looked around and drew her shoulders up uneasily, her mood changing abruptly. "Hey, I heard what you had to do for Toph. It was on the news. You're a good friend," Suki lifted her own hand and patted him on the back in commendation.

Zuko frowned briefly, before smiling at her again. "Thanks," he replied, and he meant it. None of that 'if you need anything' bullshit, or trying to _help _him; just a kind word. That was it. Zuko was thankful for that alone. He didn't want to talk about it, he didn't want to _clear his head; _he just wanted to move on. He was going to move on and forget it had ever happened. If he could. "Where are you running anyway?" he asked curiously.

Suki's smile returned. "I thought you might know where Katara is," she tilted her brows up innocently, a cheeky smirk on her face. Her belly growled again, but she ignored it.

Zuko guessed that look meant she wanted to gush over the baby with Katara right now, but he noted by the way her stomach growled that she'd probably missed breakfast, as high school students are wont to do. He opened his mouth and took a long, self-satisfied blink. "You know," he began mischievously, in a teasing tone, "it _sounds _like the 'Cookie' wants food right now. Come on, I'll buy you breakfast."

Suki rolled her eyes. "I take it you and Katara are having another 'we kissed so we're avoiding each other' awkwardness?"

Zuko froze. "Huh?"

"Come on, it's written all over your face. Either that or you two are fighting. So which is it?" Suki would've put her hands on her hips if she weren't walking.

The scarred teen sighed, continuing to walk alongside Suki. "It's kind of like both at the same time," he thought aloud, lips thinning against one another in pensive pondering. And this was true. It was both awkward and hostile at the same time. They _had _kissed, a couple of times really, but the awkwardness wasn't because of that. Fuck, he didn't know himself what it was. He wished he did, but he didn't. And it wasn't _awkward, _per se, just … complicated. "I'll tell you when I figure it out."

* * *

><p>Understandably, Aang and Toph were inseparable the entire day. Not only was Toph craving sex every hour on the dot, even Aang was more affectionate than usual, and that was saying something. I mean, the guy hung off her like a drape anyway, but this was taking it to new extremes. He'd actually offered to carry her bag for her, even. And that hadn't gone down well. Eventually, Toph had told him to stop worrying, and that she was fine.<p>

Aang sighed. "It's not that. I just want to make the best of the time we …" he trailed off distractedly, not wanting to have to go into detail. In fact, he hadn't really meant to even touch on the subject, but it was on his mind and he was bad at keeping secrets. That skill hadn't rubbed off on him from either Katara or Zuko. They were all sat on the floor in the eerie stairwell, cutting class just because they wanted to.

Sokka instantly jumped on this. "What are you talking about, Aang?" he teased in a scolding tone, meaning just to chastise Aang for being a worrywart, but turning it into a bit of a joke by the end of his sentence, "Toph's not _dying _or anything. And you're not either. You guys have plenty of time to make the best of!" Sokka chortled, sat on the hall floor with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling between, defying gravity.

Aang just looked away sheepishly.

Suki straightened where she sat with one ankle under the knee of the other leg, hands in her lap, across from Aang on the floor of that fabled Stairwell G where a boy had been stabbed in the neck with a scissors, her features softening in concern as she eyed Aang. "I know that look. There's something you're not telling us, Aang. Isn't there?" she tilted her brows up again in a worrisome way.

Toph looked to the bald boy next to her with suspicion. Once she saw his expression, there was no denying that something was bothering him. "What's up, twinkletoes?" she queried carefully, brows coming down, "you look like a kicked puppy," she commented, in the most affectionate tone she could muster.

Aang sighed heavily and placed his palms in his eye sockets. "I might have to go to a different foster home soon. I might have to leave Dahlia Coast," he informed them, sitting cross-legged in that sagely, monk-like position none of the others were flexible enough to imitate, try as they may to do so.

There was a resounding gasp between them.

"What?" Katara frowned suddenly, before blowing one of the stray strands of brown hair out of her face. "Why?"

Sokka piped in. "Somethin' happened with your moms?" he wondered aloud.

Aang shook his head, frowning. "It's a little more complicated than that, Sokka," he replied in a voice that seemed to embody futility and indecision.

"Complicated how?" Zuko raised his good eyebrow, arms crossed over his chest, one leg extended in front of him, the other foot flat on the ground with its knee bent up at a right angle. He recognized the tone in Aang's voice; he'd heard it in his own many times before. It usually came before he made a decision that blew up in his face. "What's complicated about it?" he asked, this time more demanding.

Aang wondered if he should tell them. They were his friends, after all. But they would either not be able to believe him, or the fact that he'd kept such a huge secret from them would cause at least _some _alienation. And who the fuck wanted to be friends with a guy one thousand years old? He would've laughed, but it really just wasn't funny. He had been blessed with this chance at life in the new millennia. Did he really want his old life to destroy his new one?

"Aang," Toph cleared her throat and poked him in the arm with the point of her index finger, from her spot next to him, her knees to her chest and an arm wrapped loosely around her shins. A ratty old green sneaker of hers squeaked on the floor as she curled her toes in it. It was rare that she called him by name.

Aang hung his head and shut his eyes. "You guys might not understand it. And if that turns out to be the case, I'll understand," he began calmly, though hesitantly, in a calm and passive tone and demeanor. He drew a long breath and exhaled, as if he were meditating, his thumb-tips meeting in his lap. He may have been meditating in that moment, for all his friends knew. "I moved across the country, from home to home, for a reason. Until I got here. My plan was always to move on after a few months, to keep moving."

The others exchanged glances, except for Toph, who continued to watch Aang intently.

"But my plan kind of … fell apart, when I met you guys," Aang looked up and met Sokka's gaze first, then Katara's, "I didn't have too many friends growing up. I grew up with men five times my age," he began, and then he stopped beating around the bush, "I grew up in a monastery. I was the youngest monk at my temple."

Toph's eyes widened, horror painted across her face. What. The. Fuck? Her boyfriend was a _monk? _The guy who made her _scream _… was a _monk_? Her mouth hung agape, and her eyes blinked as if the modest look on Aang's face would be replaced with a mischievous 'just kidding' expression. "Twinkletoes, you'd better be joking," she shook her head in confusion.

Aang sighed. "I'm not. My parents put me in the monastery when I was two, because some … bad people were looking for me. It's a really long story. Eventually those people caught up with me at the monastery, nine years later, when I was eleven. And long story short, I ended up here, in America; Florida, to be exact. I had no social security number, but some guy … 'Teo'? … Anyway, he hooked me up with one and got me into Social Services. I knew those guys would come after me again, so I just kept shifting from place to place."

The young Avatar looked up and eyed all his friends. Suki was watching him with a wide-eyed look of awe on her face. Sokka and Zuko both had their chins on a hand and were staring at the bald kid, scrutinizing his story, deep in thought. Katara was looking away thoughtfully, one brow raised. Toph's expression was probably the funniest, but it was the one that bothered him the most. She was watching him, both in disbelief and anger.

Zuko was the first to speak, his eyes down, his tone thoughtful. "You speak perfect English, though," he pointed out rather obviously. "And with the _accent. _How is that?" Despite being full-blooded Japanese, Zuko had been born and raised in New York, New York, until his family had moved back to the Dahlia Coast to move in to the family mansion, once his grandfather Azulon had named Ozai as the main benefactor of his will.

Aang, who was quite obviously Chinese, though a variation of the traditional trademarks, thought about this for only a second. "I had to speak perfect English, to keep moving. The guy who got my papers, he taught me some, and then he got me some English language books to learn from. I just learnt to keep my mouth shut until I knew I could speak it like a native," he explained calmly.

Sokka smirked. "Well, not like a _native. _English was never a _native _language. The Romans brought it to Britain when they invaded it, and then the English brought it to the states when _they _invaded. If you want to speak like a _real American, _Aang, you have to do this!" and then Sokka opened his mouth into an oval shape and rhythmically patted his lips with one hand while making a high-pitched noise, resulting in a childish imitation of a Native American war cry.

Aang smiled at this. "I thought you guys were Native American, aren't you?" he was referring to Katara and Sokka.

Katara shrugged and made a gesture with her hand as if this were only partially true. "Sort of. Our dad is one-hundred-per-cent Native American, but our mother was Filipino. So, fifty-fifty, I guess. Besides, it doesn't really matter. As far as language is concerned, we're all lumped into a box labeled 'American', right?" she joked half-heartedly.

Toph didn't care who was what percentage of what, she just wanted to know why she was hearing about this just now. "Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Who are these people chasing you?" Toph eyed her boyfriend seriously, pale green eyes gleaming in contempt. She crossed her arms over her chest, just under the swell of her breasts, and glared at Aang.

Aang seemed uneasy at this question. He needed to simplify. "They're … a faction, dedicated to a cause. I honestly couldn't tell you what they want me for. They're a kind of extremist organization. I can't really explain it better than that," he pulled a half-frown of apology, "Sorry, Toph."

Toph mulled this over thoughtfully. "So … they're like a terrorist movement."

Aang shook his head. "Not exactly. In fact, they're dedicated to world peace. They're just also dedicated to allowing the world its _fate. _Whether or not it involves allowing world war three to start up," he then chuckled, "reminds me of that joke … 'we want peace, and we're willing to go to war to get it'."

Suki spoke up pensively. "So why now? Why would you have to leave now? Just because you have to, because of your plan … or …"

"Because they called me. Yesterday. On my _cell phone,_" he noted emphatically, "They know exactly where I am. This guy said I was the world's last hope for peace, or something like that," Aang exhaled thoughtfully, "hell, the guy even predicted the future …"

Sokka snorted a laugh. "The World's Last Hope For Peace!" he exclaimed, obviously amused, "sure, you often play the mediator, Aang, but that's taking it a little _too _far. What, do they want to give you superpowers and a cape and ask you to fly around the world really fast and make time go the other way?" Sokka threw his arms up in the air in a jelly-like dance for emphasis of his point.

Aang smiled weakly. "Maybe. Who knows?" he joked humorlessly.

"Well, these people are obviously fucking crazy," Zuko ceded calmly, "and if they come for you, Aang, we're not going to let them take you. Alright? So don't take off any time soon," he shot his friend an assuring smile, and everyone cheered in response to this, bar for Katara, who just smiled thoughtfully and kept her eyes trained on the floor.

* * *

><p>The Fortuneteller woman smiled fondly at the aging acrobat across the table from her. She could always beat him at cards, no matter how hard he tried to win. He smiled, and the lines of age on his face deepened as he did so. They played in the fortuneteller's tent, each with a cup of herbal tea at their right hand. The acrobat's name was Sang, and he was forty-one years old. He had enough money in the bank to buy a home in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his daughter and eight-month-old grandson lived.<p>

But he wouldn't leave the circus short an act.

He had met with twelve different performers, but none of them fit the bill. None of them had gotten on with the rest of the circus acts, and they all wanted center-stage, though none of them had star quality. Sure, they could do the act, maybe even some as good as he could himself, but they wanted to be a star the first time they did a hand-stand, where it had taken him years to have a name.

"Sang," Aunt Wu began in a soothing tone, "you seem troubled."

Sang frowned wanly, his age getting the best of him. "I am troubled. It sometimes seems as if I'll be a circus performer until I die. I was just thinking of my family."

"In due time, Sang, the right one will come along. And soon, too."

"Your tarot cards have failed you before, Aunt Wu."

Aunt Wu chuckled. "Perhaps, they have, but one time in a hundred is a twist of fate, not a streak."

Sang smiled and lifted his cup. "Maybe you're right," he took a sip, his lips in a pleasant curve of amusement, "maybe we'll get to the next spot - what is it? Dahlia Coast this time? - And the perfect replacement with stroll into the circus, just to look at the attractions, and your precious fate," he teased fondly, "will lead them to my tent. Maybe. Just maybe."

Aunt Wu lifted her own cup and took a sip, smiling slightly and warmly. "Just maybe," she agreed.

The Circus was coming to Town.

* * *

><p>Katara was rather frustrated with her left arm - more specifically, her left hand. Why the hell did she even have to <em>take <em>a music lesson three times every two weeks? If it had been once a week, it would've been too much. It was completely pointless. Luckily, Katara had missed her lesson on Monday, having been in Los Angeles, but now her stupid-ass music teacher was making her stay late to practice, on account of her 'getting rusty'.

They had been having a substitute with Music for a few weeks, since Mr. O'Leary had left, because their usual music teacher, a serious, perpetually frowning woman who didn't get on with either Aang or Zuko, but somehow got on with Suki and Sokka, had to work with Ms. Yugoda with the drama club putting on 'Needful Things' in honor of O'Leary's return tomorrow. Either way, the old music teacher was back and it sucked.

After trying and failing to get her scales right nearly fifty times, Katara put down the goddamn guitar and put her face in her hands for a short breath in the empty music room. When she took her face from her palms, she noticed something rather unsettling. Her left hand was trembling. Thumb, index, middle, ring and pinkie fingers were all shaking so badly that it looks liked the trembling began at the wrist. Katara frowned worriedly at her hand.

This wasn't good.

She checked her right hand to be sure it wasn't happening to both, and it wasn't. Her right hand was sturdy and solid, reliable to carry weight if need be. She was right-handed, sure, but she'd always had a certain level of ambidexterity at her disposal. She was unable to write left-handed, but she could open doors, pour a kettle, flip an egg, use a remote, pull a trigger, dial a phone number and certain other simple tasks, with her left hand. More complicated things, like typing one-handed, she did right-handed.

Either way, she'd never been this useless with her left.

"Fucking …" Katara picked up the guitar again and put it over her lap, wrapping her left hand around the neck at the first few frets, played an open 'A', and pressed a trembling middle finger down on the fourth string, into the second fret to play the 'B'. A bolt of pain shot up her arm and she left go of the string before even attempting to play the note. "Agh! Shit!" she cursed, lowering her head and exhaling angrily.

"Relax, Katara," came a soothing, familiar voice, "you'll get it."

Katara looked up and over her shoulder to see Yue and Song approaching through the door with warm smiles on their faces. Katara sighed. "I used to be able to do this all day," she negated in annoyance, putting the guitar down and frowning wanly. "I guess I'll pick it up at home. Sokka'll probably let me borrow his," she pulled her mouth one way, thinking aloud.

Song pulled up a chair and Yue stayed on her feet, hands tucked in her pockets with a nervous look on her face. She wondered if Suki had told Katara that she and Sokka had been together - that it had caused them to break up. Well, not entirely, but mostly. It had mostly been the reason they'd broken up. Song sat sideways on a chair, an elbow on the back of it, watching Katara for a moment.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Katara glanced to Yue suspiciously, wondering if she knew what was up with Song.

Song sat a little straighter. "You know that horse I told you about? The one my dad's selling?"

Katara nodded. "Yeah, sure. What about it?"

"Well, he's got a buyer for it. Some lady from Kentucky; she wants to race it," Song grimaced pensively. "She offered seven grand for it."

With a raised eyebrow, Katara blinked in confusion. "But I thought you said it was an American Paint horse. Thoroughbreds are for racing, not paints …" she trailed off, glancing once again between the two girls. Why did any of this matter to her? What business of hers was it?

"This horse is _fast. _He beat her part-bred Quarter Horse in a barrel race a few weeks ago. That's why she wants the horse. But that's not really the point," Yue shrugged thoughtfully.

Song nodded. "The point is that you know what happens when racehorses pass their prime. They're sold on to be lesson horses, and then they hurt some kid and get put down, because racehorses are _not _kids' ponies. That's what happened to 'Heza Shinin' Star', that colt we had when we were in eighth grade," she pointed out glumly.

Katara tilted her head to one side in thought, trying to figure out what this had to do with her. Yeah, it was a real shame the horse was going to be ruined by the racetrack, but what could she do about it? She didn't have seven grand to buy a horse. She didn't even know whether her father would _allow _her to have a horse. "That's terrible, Song, but … what does this have to do with me?"

Song looked up and smiled briefly, lifting a hand and drawing something out of her pocket. "Here. This is a picture of him. We call him 'Tomahawk', but his full name is 'Chiefs Star Runner', because his sire is our stallion, Chief, and his dam is 'Stellar Janet', that palomino paint mare we imported from Texas …" she produced a photograph from her pocket and extended it to Katara.

Katara took the picture and examined it curiously. Well, it certainly was a horse. It was a nice horse, too, a red chestnut with solid, clean tobiano markings, but it looked a little dangerous. It seemed not to like its picture being taken, and the person holding the horse by its headcollar was obviously holding it a bit too tightly. To Katara, it seemed like the stable-hand holding the paint horse was terrified of it. Yue and Song exchanged glances. Katara wondered if she could even handle the horse in the picture. Sure, she could ride like a pro, but she'd only ever ridden a pony, and Song's horse, Apache, who was an angel.

"He's gorgeous," Katara admitted reluctantly.

"Katara, you _need _a horse. It's a waste for your riding talent to just go wasted. And this lady is going to totally screw him up. Sure, he's a little … ornery … but you can handle him. He doesn't deserve to go get ruined by those horrible thoroughbred trainers," Song practically pleaded; her voice did everything short of getting on her knees to win Katara over.

Katara wanted the horse. That much was true, whether or not she was still scared to get on a horse after so long without riding. "I don't have seven grand. Your dad isn't going to sell me a horse for half what's already been offered. And I've got a lot on my plate right now to be taking on something else … I wish I could. He sounds like a great horse."

Both Song and Yue sighed heavily, hanging their heads. Katara offered the picture back.

Song shook her head. "Keep it. The lady is coming to pay for him and take him back to Kentucky next weekend. If anything changes before then, you have my number, right?"

Katara nodded assertively as Song got up with a weary smile on her face and turned to leave. The two disappeared and Katara tucked the photograph into the back pocket of her skinny jeans, and then glared at the guitar. Oh, fuck it. She had detention anyway for skipping class to hang with the others, and Aang, Toph, Zuko, Suki and Sokka were going to be in detention with her, so it wasn't going to suck.

Katara got up and went to get lunch.

* * *

><p>"I forgot how disgusting cafeteria food was," Toph stuck her tongue out and eyed the sandwich in her lap; a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich made with gooey tomatoes, wilting lettuce and bread with road-chippings in it. "You'd think they were trying to give you food poisoning or something," she gagged comically, sitting on the grass with her back to the only tree on the school grounds.<p>

Aang sat on the other side of the tree, his hand within range to take hold of hers, facing the other way. He poked through the salad he'd made that morning with a fork from home. "Yup," Aang agreed simply, stabbing his fork through a cherry-tomato and bringing it to his mouth, popping it in and squashing it between his teeth so its insides squirted out on the grass.

"Aang!" Sokka whined, gesturing emphatically to the tomato-juice-squirt patch on the leg of his jeans from where he sat on the grass, munching a chocolate-chip cookie happily. He had another cookie in his other hand, and he intended to eat that one too before lunch hour was over. Toph eyed the cookie greedily.

"Here," Toph reached around the tree and into Aang's pocket, drawing out his pack of tissues and extending it to Sokka. As she expected, he put down the cookie in his hand, to take the tissues. He held his current cookie in his teeth while using both hands to wipe at the tomato juice on his jeans. Toph snatched the cookie so fast Sokka didn't even notice it was gone.

Suki spotted the quick-as-lighting snatch by Toph, and smirked, sprawled on the grass, propped on her elbows beside Sokka. She glanced further up the lawn to see Katara and Zuko both walking toward them, a distance from each other that told her they had met up while looking for the rest of the gang, but didn't want anyone thinking they were coming _together. _Because they weren't.

Yup. They were fighting.

Sokka swallowed the last bite of his cookie and lifted his other hand to bite into the next, only to find his teeth clenched on his thumb. His eyes widened and he looked around for his cookie. He lifted a leg to check that it hadn't fallen between them onto the grass. His cookie! Where was his cookie? He searched around frantically before he looked up to the others, looking for the culprit of the cookie thievery.

Toph wasn't dumb enough to start eating the cookie before Sokka had realized it was gone; because then he would've realized and seen her as the culprit on the spot. She hid it in her pocket and looked up into the tree, and the sunlight shining through it, as if she had nothing to do but wish her school cafeteria food was nicer.

Sokka's eyes settled on Suki and the self-satisfied, smug look on her face. He sat straighter and pointed at her plaintively. "You've got my cookie!" he exclaimed suddenly.

Suki jumped at this and stared at Sokka. A horrified look came over her face. What? Who had told him! Had Katara … had Katara told Sokka about the baby? Why would Katara have done that? Suki wondered what she did now. "No I don't!" she negated in a sputtering, nervous tone, staring at him with wide, worried eyes.

"Yes you do! It's written all over your face!" Sokka lunged for her and somehow ended up straddling her, lifting one of her arms to look where she was hiding it. She didn't have it in her hand, and she was wearing pocket-less Capri pants today, with the blue t-shirt he'd bought her for Christmas last year. She had no pockets to hide it.

Suki yelped, quite obviously against having her arms lifted up in search, but then she laughed out against her better judgment. "Sokka, get off me!" she exclaimed, half amused and half horrified with the possibility of him knowing about the Cookie. "I don't have your cookie!" she repeated, lifting the arm not being held by Sokka in search to try to push him off her.

"My cookie!" he lamented melodramatically, "don't hide it from me, Suki! I want it! It's mine! I promise to look after it!" he jutted his lower lip out and made the puppy-dog face down at her, while she struggled not to laugh.

Suki swallowed hard, her laughter dying down and her seriousness returning. "Sokka, get off! I do NOT have your Cookie!" she affirmed calmly; as calmly as she could with him sitting on her. He promised to look after it? Okay, now she knew he wasn't talking about the biscuit. He was talking about the baby, and whoever had told him was dead meat.

Sokka refused to believe this. "Tell you what, I'll split it with you!" he suggested gleefully; even the prospect of having _half _his cookie back was appealing. "You can even have the side with more chips on it!" he promised reasonably, letting go of her and locking his fingers together in a 'please-sir-can-I-have-some-more' pose. Apparently he _had _been talking about the cookie-cookie, and not the baby-cookie.

Suki paused. _'Huh?' _she heard herself double-taking in her head. He was talking about … oh, fuck, right … "Heh," she heard herself give a situational chuckle and then dropped her head back to the grass under her, wanting to bury her head and hide her shame. She took a long blink and blew a breath to the air. "That's generous of you, Sokka, but I really and truly do not have your cookie. Toph took it."

Toph moaned immediately. "Ngaawh!" he whined suddenly, "why'd you sell me out?"

"Because I don't have a cookie to share with him," she breathed. Not entirely true, but whatever.

Sokka pounced on Toph then, and eventually got most of his cookie back. He fell back to the grass, chewing the gooey delicacy until it was gone from existence. When Zuko and Katara actually got close enough to pay attention to them instead of each other, they silenced to listen in closely, wondering if they had begun to argue yet. Apparently, they hadn't.

"What's up with the wrestling?" Katara glanced to Suki with a raised eyebrow.

Sokka piped up. "I thought she had my cookie," and he wiped crumbs from his mouth.

Zuko pulled an amused half-smile at the irony of this and shot it at Suki, who seemed less amused. He heard Katara gave a single, humored chuckle at it from beside him. "And she didn't?" he queried smugly.

"Nope. Toph stole it."

"Ah."

"Yup."

"Speaking of the great and wondrous Blind Bandit," Toph spoke up, looking up to Zuko, and then meeting Katara's eyes, before shooting a mischievous look in each of her friends' directions, "I have the single most amazing plan in the history of the _world, _and it doesn't involve any super-criminal stuff, or anyone getting hurt, yada-yada, safety-disclaimer and so on," she grabbed her backpack from beside her and unzipped it.

Aang glanced over his shoulder, around the tree, to look at her, wondering what her plan was.

Toph drew out a piece of paper she had printed out at home, the night before, while chatting to Aang on facebook. "Truth Or Dare, The 21-plus Version," she read aloud, the delighted look on her face growing by the second, "we're gonna play this … in detention." She grinned madly, and it looked to them as if she were on a large variety of drugs in that moment.

The others stared at her, and there was a long silence between them. Aang, of course, was the calmest, already having played this game with Toph.

"That sounds like the single most horrible plan _ever,"_ Sokka finally ended the silence.

"You afraid to get beaten by a fourteen-year-old?" Toph immediately retorted.

Sokka sputtered. "No!"

"Great," and then she read aloud for another moment, "what you will need; a container of 10-20 cherries, check … a can of whipped cream, check … a bottle of chocolate sauce, check, four to six porno magazines, check, and check on that too … yeah, I've got everything …" and she patted her bag, gently.

She looked up and saw the others all gawping at her with wide eyes, dropped jaws, deep red blushes on their faces, all compiled into horrified expressions.

Toph grinned. "Don't sweat it guys," she glanced specifically at Sokka, and then Zuko, "if I wanted an orgy, I wouldn't include Katara and Suki."

"I think I'm gonna **puke**," Zuko turned and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to get rid of the image of an orgy with Toph, Aang and Sokka in his head.

"Jesus fucking- oh, _shit_, get it out, get it **out**!" Sokka clutched either side of his head, trying to get rid of the same mental image - not very successfully, might I add.

Suki and Katara shot Toph a scolding glance. Katara reached to take her bag off her shoulder.

"Whoa!" Aang exclaimed, and in the background behind his voice, Katara heard Suki and Toph making noises of surprise.

Katara eyed the others in confusion. What were they looking at?

"Katara, what's going on with your hand?" Suki sat up straight, as if Katara had just broken out with plague-like sores.

The Marina girl frowned and held up her left hand. It was shaking a lot worse now. A strain of worry blossomed in her stomach like a heavy, sinking stone. She imagined it was a good thing she hadn't actually touched anything with her hand; it would've hurt, and she knew that for fact. "Oh …" she murmured thoughtfully, "it's been like that all day."

Toph grimaced. This unnerved Katara because nothing ever rattled the cage of the great Blind Bandit. "Shit, Katara, you should get a cast or something on that," she suggested.

Katara shook her head and lowered her hand to her side. "It's not injured. Casts are for fractures, not tremors," she pointed out modestly.

"What happened to that sling you had?"

Katara looked to Zuko, who was staring at her trembling hand with concerned eyes. She was so taken aback by this - by the troubled look in his eyes - that it took her a moment to answer. "I threw it in the trash … I couldn't get used to being one-handed," she pulled a rather rueful expression and drew her shoulders up. Then she dropped her shoulders immediately; pain shot down her left arm.

Zuko caught the subtle wince she gave and exhaled. "Well, that was a smart idea," he scolded her sarcastically. She was unsure whether he was talking about getting rid of the sling or drawing up her shoulders and causing herself pain, but she guessed it didn't matter.

And angry Zuko was back.

Zuko took a small step to get closer to her and slid her bag off her shoulder. He adjusted the strap so it would only come to her hip, rather than where it usually stopped, against her thigh, and then put it over her head, so it came across her torso. Catching onto what he was doing, Katara rested her elbow on top of her bag, a minimal relief coming from her arm being supported. "Keep your arm still. You move it and it's only going to get worse," he told her gravely, and then continued, "I'll try to get you something from Lu Ten."

Katara smiled briefly. "Thanks."

Zuko didn't say 'you're welcome', or 'don't sweat it', but Katara hadn't expected him to. He just stared at the still-trembling hand resting on the bag, and then sighed, before sinking to sit on the grass. He opened his bag and drew out a pack of cigarettes, then looked around for his lighter. Then he frowned hard when he couldn't find it.

_'Whoops …' _Katara thought to herself, remembering having taken Zuko's lighter to take a few puffs of weed back in that shithole motel on the highway. She had it with her, in fact - not the marijuana, but the lighter - but she couldn't give it to him now. He'd ask why she'd taken it, after getting annoyed with her for taking it in the first place, and then she'd have to come up with something, because she couldn't say 'I took it to take a few hits of a reefer' in front of her brother.

"Anyone got a light? I must've left mine at home," Zuko asked, a cigarette held loosely between his lips.

"I thought you said you were gonna quit," Aang pointed out pensively.

Zuko glanced to Katara, who was slowly lowering herself to the grass, maneuvering herself so as not to put too much strain on her arm. "I am. Just not today," he answered solemnly. He remembered her offering to help him quit; and he still wanted to quit, too. But somehow, even with the 'No More Secrets' thing, they had managed to drift apart.

* * *

><p>Demonic blue-green eyes so pale they got guessed for albino shot around the hallway as the owner of them walked. The man with the whitened eyes (due to a botched scientific experiment on his wife's part) strode down this hall so sure-footedly that one might have thought he owned the place. They wouldn't have been completely wrong. He was fit and athletic for a man in his late forties, with steely gray hair with areas of black remaining from his youth.<p>

A clean-shaven jaw jutted forward as its owner gnashed his teeth with anxious anticipation, and beady little pupils within narrow eyes darted back and forth, sweeping like a drone for the woman he had come to see, from behind reflective sunglasses to counteract the sunshine of California, which he wasn't used to, having lived his entire life in London, England.

He pushed open a door marked with a familiar name, and stepped into the doorway to see a woman rushing around a lab frantically, holding a clipboard and reading as she moved. The door swung shut behind him and clicked, causing her to look up. The clipboard slipped through her fingers and clattered on the ground. Her eyes widened and her lips parted.

"Dominic," she gasped in surprise.

"Katherine," he bowed his head shallowly and looked around her laboratory, catching sight of a man closer to Katherine's age working at a desk, having paused in his work to see the new entrant. Dominic recognized the man immediately. "Dr. Richard Mason," he added genially, as a kind of greeting.

Richard Mason smiled briefly, got up with his research and moved toward Dominic. He brushed past, offering the older man a polite smile, and left the room, not wanting to be in the room for this. Katherine picked up her clipboard from the floor and put it on one of the counters. "What are you doing here, Dominic?" she asked calmly, her back to him, replacing some of the vials in their cradles.

"I'm here to see my daughter. And you."

Katherine furrowed her brow. She couldn't deny him that, she supposed. "How lovely," she commented politely, not really knowing her husband all that well, despite having fucked the guy a few times sixteen years ago because he wanted a kid. Damn, it was a strange fucking world, she mused. "And how long will you be in Dahlia Coast?"

"A few days, maybe a week. I'm giving a lecture in Sacramento about some of the sites I explored last year in the Arctic and Antarctic seas," he patted the satchel on his hip, hanging from his shoulder, proudly, with a small smile. He flipped open the leather top of it, and then tentatively asked; "would you like to see some of the findings?"

Katherine smiled hesitantly; she'd be lying if she said she didn't admire her husband's work, she just saw him more as a teacher than a lover. He was a good ten years older than her, and he had been a famous archaeologist when she'd been in college. The two had met in a strange turn of fates that she really couldn't explain. They'd met at an archaeology function in London, and then all of a sudden her parents had promised her to him.

She nodded.

He brought out some photographs, all with a blue tint thanks to having been taken underwater, and handed them over to her. They were ruins; ancient buildings under the sea. Made of _ice. _One picture in particular, marked 'Arctic Sea' was from above, of an entire city sunken under the water, just completely made up of ice buildings. There were streets in the city, and at the top of it was what looked like a temple.

"It's an entire civilization," Katherine noted breathlessly, "preserved by the ice."

Dominic Roberts seemed tickled by her awe. "There were archaic runes in some of the ice, but they were frosted over for the most part. A lot of it was Germanic, but some I even found in Latin. My apprentices compared it to the legends of Plato's Atlantis, but I can't think of anything like it. I can't think how any kind of civilization could've built these kind of buildings in the same way igloos are built."

Katherine gave a wordless agreement. "Hmm … this one …" she pointed to a particular picture, "looks more like the Germanic runes were carved in after the Latin ones. The Latin ones look more _pressed _in, rather than carved. The Germanics seem as though they came after."

"They do," Dominic agreed, "It seems as though the civilization that originally built this city died off decades before the Germanic runes were carved in. I can only imagine this was during the high middle ages, and then the city must've either dropped off into the sea, or become submerged in water with rising sea levels. Strangely, despite the Latin scriptures and carvings, the buildings were all built with architecture similar to that in eastern Asian countries like China, Mongolia, the Philippines, Japan, etcetera."

"How strange," she examined another picture, taken from inside one of the buildings.

"That's the temple at the top of the city, with some broken clay pottery … I can't imagine how they _made _pottery up there; there's no clay, and I doubt if they'd be able to get temperatures high enough to mold it, even if they did."

"Unless they imported it. It's not too far a stretch to imagine they did. When do you estimate this culture lived?" Katherine looked up to him from where she leant at the counter over the pictures.

"I'm thinking between 400AD to 1100AD, by the sophistication of their city, and the parchments and relics I was able to collect. Some things were preserved in ice, would you believe it …" he collected his photographs again and slipped them into his satchel, flipping it shut, "I'm also guessing the Germanics came about 1200AD, though it really just looks like a form of graffiti. They didn't cultivate the city; they just carved over the runes. They may even have taken some of the relics."

Katherine's brow lifted in thought. "Interesting. Er, could I see the relics and parchments you collected?" she asked hopefully.

Dominic Roberts shot her his most charming smile.

* * *

><p>Aidan Riker was minding his own business, sitting at one of the computers in the library, with a smug, amused look on his face as he rested his head on a fist. He wasn't so stupid as to let the Marina girl know he knew who she was - that would be pure foolishness. He was gradually finding the façade more and more fun; putting on the face of the curious, well-meaning new guy. Nobody had guessed he was an ex-con.<p>

Zuko wasn't a very talkative guy, he supposed, and he wasn't the type to spread gossip.

But she was his favorite, so far. They had met twice now, and she still hadn't the slightest interest in him. This was a first. Usually women fell for the strong-silent act in the first encounter, and occasionally it would take a second meeting to completely hook them - to have them clinging desperately to him like drapes. But for the second encounter not to even make a dent? No, she was different, much as he hated to say that about anyone.

He couldn't say honestly that Slugger was 'different'. He was just as dumb and dopey as the rest of the kids in this school; he just had bad intentions. He just amused himself the same way Aidan did. Killing cats and dogs was still good fun for Slugger, but to Aidan in was like earning pennies. For the amount of reward that it offered, it just wasn't worth it. Slugger was just like the rest of 'em. Pliable. Manipulable.

Daniel, or Slick, as Aidan often called him, was a little irregular, but when it came down to the basics, he was a normal guy too. He had a brain in his head, but he didn't think out of the box. He could strategize, he could do basic math, he could put a pretty good bomb together - that was the real reason Aidan kept him around - but at the end of the day, he was just a guy. Aidan knew the guy was hardcore into S&M shit and dominator roleplay, but other than that, Aidan pegged him for a conventional Joe.

Daniel could be manipulated just as easily as Slugger.

If Aidan had had Zuko on his side, he would have no need for Slugger or Daniel. Zuko was different. Zuko, try as he may to deny it, was just like Aidan. Sure, he'd been born with a silver spoon in the mouth, but after that, they'd lived the same freaking life. Aidan had had his ass kicked every _fucking _night once his father got home with some skank on his arm. Eventually he'd snapped, and shot the bastard in his sleep.

Too good for the son of a bitch, he thought to himself.

And Zuko was the same; his father was an abusive fuck, whether or not the abuse was still physical. He knew if Zuko were on his side; if he could get the Scorsese to bend under his power of manipulation - that he would be set. That the world would never know what had hit it. But, as it were, Zuko was different. He knew what to watch out for.

Aidan was unsure as of yet whether the Marina girl was the kind of 'different' he was looking for, but he didn't care. Women were useless for anything but sex. He guessed this one for a virgin; how he loved those. He imagined she'd be good for a couple of good fucks and then he'd finish her off. He wondered which one he felt like this time around. Drowning? Hanging? Certainly not an overdose - he knew for fact that she'd had a suicide attempt by overdose before.

It would be unoriginal, and just wouldn't do.

Then it hit him and his lips curled in devious deliciousness. He hadn't had a self-immolation in ages, since that drug addict in the pen. The flare of the fire consuming his body and the screams of futility and suffering had just about gotten Aidan to a cloud nine. The deviant at the computer leant back in his seat and grinned in recollection. Yes, he decided, this time around there would be a fire.

There was a loud explosion in his headphones and his interest was piqued. His eyes returned to the computer screen; to the snuff website he constantly trolled. Most of it was security camera footage, but occasionally there was stuff from snuff films and videos that idiotic teenagers had filmed of them killing themselves on webcam. He loved shit like this, though it was never as satisfying as an actual kill.

It was on this site that he'd found the Jonathan Prescott footage. He'd watched what he'd thought to be the worst moments of the girls' lives with enthused amusement, his lips curved into a sickly divine smile. And he'd read the newspaper stories of the girl who'd given herself up with a GPS to save the other girls, and still gotten away with her purity intact. He could practically smell her flesh burning already.

Yes, the hunter declared in his head; she would be a fine kill.

* * *

><p>"This is retarded," Zuko scowled, sitting cross-armed in a tilted-back chair, his feet up on the table before him as Toph unpacked the most random series of things to have in a backpack ever. Seriously; Toph had brought a can of whipped cream in a small cooler bag thingy to school. How she had even planned for them all to end up in detention was beyond him.<p>

"Beyond retarded," Sokka agreed, watching Aang waste time, sat in a chair with his elbows on a table.

The more surprising thing was that there were no other kids in detention. The usual ten to fifteen kids in detention seemed to be behaving themselves for once. But, that happened a lot with Toph - things just fell into place for her because she was good at planning. Unlike Zuko. Things never really went that well for him. The scarred teen rocked his chair back and forth on its hind legs, one ankle hooked over the other in boredom.

Aang was skillfully keeping an empty coke can off the floor with his supreme soccer skills, sometimes hitting it with the top of his foot, sometimes with the side; at one point he'd even turned and knocked it up with his heel, before turning back and keeping it off the hardwood floor yet again. "Well …" Aang began, knocking the can back up into the air, "… it's not actually … as bad as you guys … think it is …"

"Yeah, not for you, because you've already seen Toph naked. Have you _read _some of the things on here?" Suki was sitting on one of the desks, reading from the sheet of paper with the questions and dares on it. "One of the rules is 'in the event that a dare slash question is refused, the refusing party must remove an item of clothing' … ?" Suki lifted her head and saw Toph grinning.

Toph rubbed her hands together. "So nobody wants to refuse their dares or questions. It's guaranteed to be awesome."

"And awkward," Katara added with a slight scoffing laugh, her arm still propped on her bag where she leant against the wall, her free hand tucked into the pocket of her skinny jeans. "You forget that me and Sokka are, you know, related. Do you have any idea how gross this is going to be for me?" she raised an eyebrow.

"So we can just enjoy you squirming, then, in that case," Toph rebutted.

"I don't think any of us wants to know - and I quote, this is an actual question on here …" Suki grimaced darkly, "What Zuko, for instance, thinks of to turn himself on …"

Aang sniggered, kicking his can back up into the air and knocking it up yet again with his forehead.

Zuko shot Aang a threatening look and allowed his scowl to deepen. "I hate you, Toph," he announced darkly.

Toph continued to laugh maniacally, pushing the last of the desks to the edges of the room to make more floor space. "Alright, everyone, sit in a circle on the floor. I'll be the game master," she snatched the paper right out of Suki's hands and approached the empty middle of the room, where the others were assuming a circle form.

When they were all seated, Toph put all the stuff she'd brought to go with the game in the middle of their circle and admired it. Then she lifted her paper and grinned. She announced that she was going to read out the rules and then they'd start. The rules were strangely bureaucratic.

"Rule one; all parties, unless otherwise stated, must answer all questions, and then expand/explain.

"Rule two; all questions must be answered truthfully.

"Rule three; all parties, unless otherwise stated, must participate in dares required of them.

"Rule four; all dares must be completed without cheating.

"Rule five; in the event that a dare/question is refused, the refusing participant must remove a piece of clothing.

"Rule six; in dares that require a universal loser, rock-paper-scissors must be played to find one."

Once all that was out of the way, there was a short spell of conversation over this, and some complaining from Zuko, and then Toph decided to start.

"Alright! Question one, for everyone; how many sexual partners have each of you had?" Toph eyed her friends impishly.

Aang was the first to bounce back. "One."

Sokka came next, "Three. Suki, Yue and Ty Lee Sisko."

Zuko raised an eyebrow at Sokka and then proceeded to count. "Uh … seven … eight … nine …" he reached up and scratched his head thoughtfully. "Eightish?" he smirked at Toph, content with having topped her for now. He imagined he was probably the biggest whore of them all. He heard Azula in his head, calling him an alcoholic, man-whoring chain-smoker.

"One," Toph answered the question without hesitation.

"Two," Suki interjected.

"What?" Aang jumped in.

Sokka rolled his eyes. "She did Dylan Greco," and then he stuck his tongue out and made a comical gagging noise.

Zuko pulled a face. "I take it that's why he's got a fractured cheekbone …" he cleared his throat, recalling this because he and Greco shared a gym class. He always beat the guy's ass at baseball, because he was slow as fuck and couldn't tell a ball from flying bird shit. "I recall, Sokka, that you pack one hell of a punch," he smirked, proud of his friend.

Sokka grinned at this. "I mean, you'd do the same, if some guy came up to you boasting about screwing Mai, right? Ex or not."

Zuko agreed. "Yeah, I would; you can't go around bragging like that and _not _get a punch in the face. One thing about having a sister is you learn the rules on 'kissing-and-telling'," he pointed out and then high-fived Sokka for landing a few nice punches on that prick of a quarterback.

Katara, at this point, was feeling a little left out, because they already knew how many sexual partners she'd had. None. Boo. This was going to suck.

"Alright, Katara's already spoken for, so next question …" Toph brought an end to that question's result. "This one's for everyone …" she grinned and looked up to the others, "how often a week do you guys have sex, 'alone or with others'?" she struggled not to break out into giggles with that last little detail.

"No way!" Suki piped up, "does it actually say that?"

Toph nodded, "It actually says that; 'alone or with others'. So come on, guys, spill the beans! For me and Aang, I gotta say at least seven times a week, right?" she glanced to Aang as if he might be able to better estimate their sex schedule. Aang nodded agreeably.

With a bright pink hue to his cheeks, Sokka crossed his arms over his chest. "Maybe … two or three times a week?" he peeked to Katara, who was trying her best to ignore this.

Suki cawed out a uniquely amused laughter, "Are you serious, Sokka? Jesus, you need to get laid a lot more than that. I'm getting at least six times a week, and that's _without _a man!" she reached out and smacked him on the arm teasingly, as he hung his head to hide his clouded face from his friends.

Katara shut her eyes, lifted her good hand to her heated cheeks and cooled them off with a cold palm, as if she didn't need speaking for. When she opened her eyes, everyone was looking at her, expecting something, but she didn't notice it; she was too confused with Suki's answer. "How can you have sex without a … I mean it doesn't seem …" then she realized everyone was staring. "What?"

Toph's and Suki's jaws were hung low, and their eyes were the widest among the others'. Toph was the first to bounce back. "How do you _live?_" she exclaimed, undecided between laughing and shouting in indignant annoyance. She turned on Sokka with a loud, harsh bark. "Whose dumb idea was it not to give her the birds and bees talk?"

Katara's face had brightened to a deep red color. "Toph-," she tried to interject, but her voice broke off at noticing the awkward way Zuko was staring at her, with a face almost as red as hers and a comically nervous frown. What was going on in his head? What the fuck had him looking so shamefaced and … well, shamefaced really was the word for it.

Sokka replied coolly, "she knows all that stuff already."

"Yeah, I already know all about, y'know …" she trailed off, avoiding the stares of her friends; and the strange looks she was getting, mostly from Suki.

Suki took over for Toph, tentatively addressing Katara. "Katara, you mean, you've _never …_ y'know …" she made a motion with her hands as if to express what she was trying to ask, "… _masturbated_?" she hissed in a low tone, and Katara stared back at her like they were having a little in-joke that she had no idea about.

Katara opened her mouth to answer, and then just shook her head in confused indignation. "No … I … how? How would … I thought that was just for guys!" she glanced from Suki to Toph, and then back to Suki and then subtly squeezed her legs tighter together. Her mouth was pulled into a shameful little frown that Zuko couldn't hellp but find adorable from his seat across the circle from her.

Toph leant over to Katara, cupped a hand around her mouth and whispered in her ear. A both horrified and intrigued look came over Katara's face, and Sokka scowled at the fact that whatever innocence his sister had left had just gone out the window, short of her actual virginity. It was a brother's pride when his sister was unspoiled by the kind of jack-offs that occupied this fucking school.

"And that … feels … nice?" Katara asked in a low murmur, her blue eyes wide and curious above the luminescent pink blush on her cheeks, yet at the same time rather disgusted.

Toph sniggered and glanced to Aang, "Well, it's not as good as a real fuck, but it does the job in a pinch," she explained calmly.

Zuko had his face hidden in one hand. "Fuck, Sokka, you didn't tell her about … that?" he spoke up abruptly, feeling the warmth in his face heating the cool skin of his fingertips.

The Marina boy jumped to his defense, "I thought my dad would!"

"You were going to leave it to _Dad _to tell me about …" Katara sputtered in embarrassed anger, "_that?" _she gestured to Toph as if she were the personification of what she'd just had explained to her. What did a person even _call _that? For a guy you called it 'jerking off', but what did you call … well, _that?_

"Alright, people, calm down, please, for the sake of the game," Toph patted Katara on the shoulder, forcing back a bubbly laugh and lifting her piece of paper, "The virgin queen's wrath shall be perilous to those who seek to infer it!" she announced, before chuckling and returning to the piece of paper, "alright, question three, for everyone … what is the biggest cockblock you have ever encountered?"

Aang yelled out his answer immediately, pointing at Katara. "You!" he exclaimed, and then crossed his arms, still not having forgiven her for that.

Katara rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on, you guys were screwing on my pool table. I'm allowed to cockblock you for that."

"What? When was this?" Sokka screeched out.

Sokka's sister had her revenge for leaving her out of the loop on masturbation. So she didn't answer him.

"Just answer the question, Sokka," Toph spoke up, "and I have to agree with Aang. That was a major cockblock."

Sokka scowled and thought about this. "My biggest cockblock was when I was trying to screw Suki when we were together and Katara was in the next room watching crappy baby kids TV cartoons because she was babysitting and she kept singing those fucking songs to the kid and you guys have no idea how hard it is to keep a hard-on when your sister is singing about the teletubbies in the next room!" he ranted irately.

Suki remembered this. "Oh yeah. That sucked. I pick that one too."

"It Totally Sucked!" Sokka panted angrily in agreement.

"Worst ever for me?" Zuko chuckled pensively, "this girl sneezes in my face while I'm trying to … you know …" he shivered, having grossed himself out in recollection. The others exclaimed in horror, with various add-ins of 'no way', 'gross' and 'that's fucking disgusting!'. Again, Katara was left out, but she was still occupied by her fuming annoyance with the fact that Toph knew more about sex than she did. There was no helping it, but it still bothered her.

"You know," Aang noted, "they say that sneezing is scientifically an eighth of an orgasm."

"Oh, wow, I feel so much better now …" Zuko replied sarcastically.

"Alright, alright, next question!" Toph continued, looking down to her sheet of paper, and then grinned at the others, "have you ever had sex with more than one person at the same time? I.e. threesome or orgy …"

"Okay, there's no way it actually says that," Katara snatched the piece of paper from Toph and stared at it, "No way!" she lifted her brows in surprise. Then she handed the piece back. "Whatever. There's nobody here who's ever done crazy shit like that," she brushed it off.

Katara then noticed that Sokka was eyeing Zuko wickedly, and Zuko had the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes, which were squeezed shut, and he was shaking his head in reminiscent pondering. Toph caught this too and choked out a shocked laughter. Aang, who for the most part was a pure and untouched _monk, _stared at his friend, unable to believe what his silence implied.

"Come on, Zuko. Tell them the story," Sokka elbowed Zuko playfully.

Zuko lifted his head from his hands and glared at Sokka, before giving an equally amused smirk and addressing the others. "This is fucking ridiculous …" he cursed, before continuing, "Me and Sokka went down to the San Diego Comic Convention last year, and Sokka somehow dumped me with these two lesbian chicks dressed as Batgirl and Robin, and they somehow roped me into … getting into a threesome with them …" he shook his head, ashamed of himself.

The others all cackled in laughter - even Katara - at his regaling story. The story wasn't even that funny; it was the terrible, horrified, ashamed look on his face as he told it. He went on at length about what a terrible decision-maker he was, and how he'd ended up twisted around to screw one girl while she screwed the other, and how he'd been so sore afterwards that he'd had to lounge in an ice bath for three hours once he got back home.

This game was getting weirder and weirder.

"Alright, so nobody else has gotten into an orgy?" Toph sniggered, glancing to Sokka and then to Suki, and they both denied ever being part of an orgy, so she moved on. "Okay, next question; have you ever had sex with someone while one of you was wearing a fetish or cosplay outfit? Zuko, we already know, but anyone else?"

Suki shot her hand up. "Me and Sokka had sex on Halloween when he was dressed like Abe Lincoln and I was dressed as Catwoman!" she exclaimed proudly.

Sokka grinned in memory. "Oh, shit, that was awesome …"

"Nobody else? Okay, moving on, next question … what is the longest time you have lasted before finishing?" she tried to recall her own answer to this, but she was unsure whether it was thirty-two minutes or twenty-three. Why did things like this escape her? She was great with numbers, and yet they escaped her when she was having sex …

Zuko guessed he would be the most successful answerer to this question. "Forty-seven minutes," he leant back against a chair and crossed his arms over his chest with a 'beat-that' expression on is face, glancing from Aang to Sokka to Suki challengingly.

"YES!" Sokka threw his arms up in celebration. "Fifty-one!" he pointed in Zuko's face triumphantly and did a little head and hand dance that looked to Zuko like a version of the moonwalk, except sitting down. Sokka high-fived Suki, for some reason, and then blew a raspberry at Zuko.

Zuko pushed his brows up nonchalantly. "Forty-eight minutes is still good," he pointed out, unbothered, his eyes shut in a calm expression.

"Ours is something like twenty-five, right?" Aang looked to Toph questioningly. Toph nodded.

Toph cleared her throat to regain the attention of her friends, "Okay, next question; what was your first ever sexual encounter with another person?" she patted Aang on the arm and grinned, "ours was at New Years', when my parents were away."

Katara scoffed, "That just sounded like an innuendo on the back of a porno movie," she teased, earning herself a snarky retort about virgins dying alone.

Suki brought her knees up and rested her arms on them. "When I was twelve," she began in a solid and unchanging voice, "my stepfather fucked me in the back of his car. He picked me up from school and parked in an alley and then …" she breathed out heavily, "whatever. I just didn't want to make up a fake answer."

Sokka reached out to her and scooted closer. He put and arm around her and squeezed lightly, before announcing calmly, "I lost my virginity to Suki," to his friends and his sister, showing no qualms about telling them this. They already knew, but he felt it needed reiterating right now.

Suki smiled and sat up straight again, perking up. "What about you, Zuko?"

Zuko smirked. "I lost my virginity at fourteen, to Mai Tamesis. Because I'm a man-whore."

"I lost my virginity to Barney the Dinosaur, and we did it in the back of his flying DeLorean, and then everyone broke out in song to the teletubbies theme and it was all very melodramatic, and then we had a massive orgy with some other children's TV characters in an episode that will forever be scarred into the minds of once-innocent children around the world," Katara recited jokingly, "The End."

Toph cackled at this, and then proceeded to ask the next question, "What do you think of to turn yourself on?"

"You," Aang answered simply.

"Fishnets," Sokka replied calmly.

"Chocolate," Suki admitted carefully.

"Aang," Toph answered the question coolly.

The four of them turned on Zuko and Katara, who were beside each other on the floor, between Toph and Suki. Zuko had his back to a desk, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes pointed deliberately away from Katara. Katara was the same, though lounging on her hip with her head on her hand, the injured one draped over her waist, her eyes shot away from Zuko. They reluctantly answered.

"Heavy breathing," Katara thought aloud, the first thing that came into her mind.

Zuko imagined this for a moment, and then added, "Moaning," trying not to imagine Katara when he imagined such.

The others didn't quite know what was going on between them - what telepathic conversation those two answers amounted to between them - but they didn't dwell on it, because there was grace in subtlety. Toph put the paper down on the floor in front of her and announced that it was time for the dares. She glanced to the small array of 'what you will need' items she had brought with her to school, and announced the first dare.

"Er … all players must remove their shirts, male and female alike," she read aloud, with some recollection of this one. "You guys cool with that?" she looked up at the others, some of who were already removing their shirts and putting them in rumpled up lumps beside them. When all her friends were shirtless, Toph one-handedly removed her shirt and put it in a lump with Aang's, and then continued, "A universal loser must describe in one word, their mental image of sex with each of their fellow players."

Toph thought about this. The universal losers were supposed to be picked via rock-paper-scissors, but she was the host, she she'd just pick one.

"Katara. You're the universal loser."

The Marina girl rolled her eyes and sot Toph a dark look. "Toph? The word I'd use is 'disheartening', for you," she smirked, and then glanced at Sokka, "The word I'd use for you is 'Eww'," then Suki, "Endurable," and then Aang, "Pleasant," and finally she settled on Zuko and smirked, "Steamy."

Zuko smirked subtly, before faking annoyance and rolling his eyes. Sokka gave a whine of disgust and then apologized for his sisters perving on Zuko, to which Zuko replied calmly that he didn't mind and that he often perved on Katara, so they were even. Zuko, Katara and Sokka got into a brief argument over what permissions were needed to perve on sisters and so on, Katara effectively ended it by saying Zuko could perve on her if he wanted, even though he was a pain in the ass.

Zuko protested that he wasn't a pain in the ass.

Katara insisted that he was.

"Okay, next dare!" Toph interrupted.

There were a few dares including licking foodstuffs off of other players, but with the chocolate sauce they just ended up licking it off their own fingers and hands thanks to its tendency to begin melting, and with the whipped cream they all declared they were not going to lick it off their fellow players and subsequently removed their socks and shoes, due to one of the rules saying they had to. Eventually they settled on a dare including one of the porno magazines in Toph's pile of oddities.

Toph picked another universal loser, who happened to be Suki, and told her she had to describe one of the images to her friends.

"So … she's uh … bending over the front of a car … and the cop is, uh … feeling her up …"

"Alright," Toph spoke up, putting down her piece of paper and crumpling it up, "No more stuff off the sheet, otherwise we'll end up having an orgy. Let's go back to truth's for a sec, because honestly, I really want to know what's going on between Katara and Zuko," she crossed her arms, her expression somewhere halfway between suspicious and amusement.

Aang jumped in too, "Yeah, no kidding."

"What are you guys talking about?" Sokka snorted in good humor, "There's nothing _going on_ between them," he elbowed Zuko to get him to agree with him.

Zuko eyed Toph darkly, his arms crossed over his chest, "Yeah. There's nothing going on like that."

Katara stayed silent, as Toph's brows went up, "Oh, right, so that's why you're desperately trying to avoid looking at each other and acting like blushing virgins when it comes to sexual details about one another, and you, Zuko, pretty much freaked out when we figured out that Katara was an even bigger virgin than you thought …" Toph adjusted her position so she was sitting cross-legged, the heels of her hands on the floor behind her and her head cocked to one side.

Sokka seemed to think about this, turning his head so he was gazing suspiciously at Zuko, who choked at this and tried his best to regain his composure. He lifted a hand to his chin and scratched briefly, narrowing his eyes at his sister, and then turning this protective gaze to Zuko.

Zuko shook his head and held up his hands, "Wherever you pulled that from, you've got it all wrong, okay, Toph? We kissed, _once, _but that was after having one too many glasses of wine at the Aristocrat. It was just …" he shrugged, as if this gesture answered whatever Toph was trying to get an answer to. He didn't notice Katara's brows come down from beside him.

Katara, lounged on her side with her head on her hand, made a tiny frown. She said nothing on the matter, knowing if there was one thing Zuko could do, it was talk himself out of things. She wondered why he was covering; everyone bar for Sokka already knew there was some extremely complicated tension between them, and sooner or later Sokka would know about it too. What, really, was the point?

Then Sokka squeaked, "Wait, you kissed my sister?"

* * *

><p>"Zuko," Katara called after him, as he walked toward his bike with his bag slung over his shoulder up ahead.<p>

He stopped, turned and watched her for a moment before his face turned into a scowl. He turned back and continued walking to his bike as she ran up behind him. She made no comment about him making her run after him, but eventually she caught up with him as he was putting his bag in the compartment of under the seat of his bike, and took a moment to get her breath back. He said nothing.

She frowned and put her good hand on her hip. "What, you're not talking to me now?" she snapped at him angrily.

He sighed and leant against the bike, "What do you want, Katara?" he fixed his gaze on her still-shaking hand at her hip, unable to meet her blue eyes.

Katara pulled her mouth into a thoughtful little grimace, "Did you mean what you said in detention?" she asked calmly, despite the troubled look on her face. If he'd been looking he may have noticed the fading blush on her cheeks, the way she noticed the one on his. He guessed she was talking about him having said they weren't 'involved'.

Zuko lifted his eyes from her hip to her face and he shook his head, replying in a calm rasp. "No."

"So what _are _we, then?" she asked, and this time he caught the innocent, hopeful worry in her tone; the slight lump in her throat she was trying to hide from him.

"I don't know," he answered truthfully, not wanting to hurt her feelings but still needing to give himself time to figure things out, "Whatever we are, it's going to be harder to figure it out with them knowing what's going on with us, and I'm still figuring it out," he tried to explain, but found he wasn't able to properly get across what he was trying to say.

Luckily, he didn't need to, because Katara just nodded and smiled briefly in understanding. "Alright. I'll … see you tomorrow, then?"

"Yeah," Zuko replied, beginning to turn back to his bike when he felt her hand on his cheek gently pulling him down. She pressed a kiss to his good cheek and then let go, shooting him a troubled smile and then stepping away. Zuko offered her the same kind of weak smile, before getting onto his bike and powering up the engine. When he looked again to see where he was, she was walking toward the main gates to walk home. "Hey!" he called out.

She stopped and turned.

"You need a ride home?"

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Chapter complete. Damn, I can't keep this up. This is probably the longest chapter ever, because of that Truth Or Dare game. I'd love to chat, but that would just make it take longer to update. So, here's the update! Aw, shit maybe I'll chat for a little while …**

**Okay, so, I've wanted to pull the circus to town for a LONG time. Aunt Wu as a fortuneteller (what else?), and Ty Lee will find her calling, and Katara will meet with a very strange witch-woman, and Zuko will be mesmerized by the fire-dancers, and elephants and other animals abounding - long story short, it will be a lot of fun.**

**Aidan? Aidan's picked his target with Katara, and Katara's unable to tell Zuko that the guy keeps bothering her because there's a rift between them. Now, I brought Dominic Roberts to the picture not to make him Aidan's puppet, but to help Katherine Roberts find out about the last genetic code in the series; Water. Keep guessing for Aidan's puppet, because out of the people I listed last time, it is NOT Zuko or Katara. That should narrow it down for you a little.**

**No Lydia in this chapter. Because I suck.**

**I have noted that many awesome minor characters have been left out, including Ozai, Ursa, Azula and her terrible Trio, Hakoda, Kelly, etc. So I need ideas for side-plots like the one I did back in LILABOC, with Ty Lee's pregnancy. Help much appreciated.**

**I Gotta go! Enjoy the chapter! REVIEW! CLICKDABUTTON!**


	18. Letters Mingle Souls

"Agh, fuck these stupid …" Lu Ten smacked his forehead down on the kitchen table; more specifically the brochures for wedding venues on the kitchen table, "why couldn't we just get married in Vegas?" he cursed irritably, and then he forced himself to look up and saw Zuko walking in with his bag in hand. "Hey, it's the best man! Best man, help me pick a fucking venue!"

Zuko gave a single, humored laugh, despite the tension his cousin could detect in his voice when he spoke. "Is Taylor catholic?" he questioned, pulling up a chair adjacent to Lu Ten and running his gaze over the brochures.

"No, but she likes the stained-glass windows that Catholic churches have. I'm thinking of these two," he showed his younger cousin two brochures; one of a cathedral and one of a beautiful venue with views of the sunset at the local beach. "She said she'd have her mother help her with the music, and the cake and the dress and all that, if I just pick out the venues. I think she really just wants me to go with the cathedral."

Zuko picked up the one of the beach venue. "This one looks better for the reception, but I think the cathedral's probably better for the ceremony," he pointed out thoughtfully.

"I was thinking that. My dad thinks we could have the ceremony in the morning, and then have the reception from noon 'til four or five, but I think I'd rather an afternoon ceremony and an evening reception. What do you think?" Lu Ten lifted his cup of coffee from the table and took a long sip from it.

"Afternoon to evening sounds better - if you go with that beach venue for the reception, you'll get a great sunset for the cake cutting and stuff, and then all your groomsmen have a better chance of getting lucky with their dates once it gets dark," Zuko smirked, his stress and confusion disappearing to the back of his mind.

Lu Ten whapped his cousin on the arm. "Why, you got a date already for it? I thought you broke up with that moody girl _ages _ago. She's dating one of the guys at the hospital."

Zuko ignored this tidbit of information and answered his cousin. "No, I don't have a date. I mean, I guess I could ask Katara, but …"

"Oh, it's like that," Lu Ten stuck his tongue out.

"Like what?"

"No, I get it - I'd be a little hesitant to get close to someone too after what happened with your friend - Tuff, wasn't it? - _And_ after what happened with that reporter," Lu Ten shook his head in a motion Zuko recognized as one his uncle made quite often; the 'oh, what a shame' gesture.

Zuko stared at his cousin for a moment. Yeah. Yeah, that was exactly _it. _That was what he couldn't explain - it was the hesitance he had needed to figure out. He was afraid to get close to Katara; after the muffled screams

_("Alain! ALAIN!")_

in the next room, that night. He'd seen just how easily the life of a loved one could be cut short. He hadn't been frustrated with Katara's naïve want to avenge her mother; he'd been scared she was going to get herself into danger. He wasn't angry with her; he was protective of her. Fuck, he didn't need a goddamn shrink - he had Lu Ten!

"Yeah," Zuko murmured thoughtfully, "that's exactly _it. _You read my mind, when _I_ couldn't."

Lu Ten scoffed. "Didn't have to. It was written all over your face; that detached look you had when you were living with me and my dad, before you tried to off yourself."

Scowly Zuko returned, briefly, before he disappeared and regular Zuko poked down on the open-plan beach-house venue brochure. "You should have the reception here. Not so sure about the cathedral for the ceremony, but the reception is a no-brainer."

"I agree. Oh, by the way, I'm having a bachelor party this weekend - Saturday night. Got it? We'll pick you up. There'll be strippers, so bring plenty of cash."

Zuko smirked and shook his head. "Isn't it a bit early to have a bachelor party? You got engaged like, three weeks ago. When exactly are you aiming this wedding for?"

"Ah," Lu Ten pulled a funny expression, "this beach venue had a cancellation for a date in two weeks, on the Tuesday, but the next one they have is in November. And we really don't want to wait so long," he explained, amused with the twist of fates. "You've got a suit, right?" he wondered aloud.

Zuko nodded agreeably, "I've got a suit. I'd just love to see you pull this off in two weeks."

* * *

><p>The Scorsese boy moved into the two-level library in the mansion as soon as he got home, to see if he had a Stephen King book he hadn't read in so long that it might come to him as a new story. He'd finished the Dark Tower series ages ago, and he hadn't been reading in a while. Maybe the great and mighty Stephen King could help him figure this shit out.<p>

He grabbed a book - 'Lisey's Story' - and sat down at one of the rosewood desks, turning the book over so he could read the blurb, when a shadow came over him and he didn't even need to look up to know his father was looming nearby like an ill-meaning demon. To Zuko's surprise, another book was slammed down on the table, in front of his Stephen King one, and he frowned.

A book on copyright law?

Ozai glared down at his confused-looking son, hands tucked into the pockets of his suit jacket. "Let's say, for arguments' sake," the older man began calmly, "that a client had invented an innovative new device that happened to be a miracle solution to a daily nuisance, and a company began producing it on the word-of-mouth logic of his or her blueprints."

The older man walked around the table until it was between him and his firstborn. Zuko blinked in confusion at his father.

"Would the client have a case?" Ozai held his hands out in a 'figure it out' gesture.

"Not unless they had a patent on the device," Zuko answered immediately, his good brow down and his eyes fixed on the taller man, "Where are you going with this?"

The ghost of a smile crossed Ozai's features before he continued glaring at his son with cold, emotionless eyes. Few things came naturally to Zuko, but law happened to be one of them. He would make a fine heir to a long line of lawyers, much as Ozai hated to admit. "You're going to Harvard this fall to take a law degree, correct?"

Zuko just nodded, before cocking his head curiously to one side and staring at his father, still confused.

"Then study. Start with Copyright law. The hypothetical case I've given you; when you happen upon the unfailing tactic to win it, you can start with Family Law - divorce settlements, custody battles, things of that sort," and then Ozai gave a shallow bow and turned to leave the library, his hands tucked into his jacket pockets.

Zuko was about to ask whether the client had a patent or not in this hypothetical case, but he answered his own question to make it harder for himself. He wanted a challenge, though in some corner of his mind he guessed this would only frustrate him. But his father had said there was an unfailing tactic, and he just had to find it. The unfailing tactic would probably work with or without a patent.

Ozai noted again, at the fact that the boy hadn't asked about an existent or non-existent patent, in his head, that his son would make a fine heir to a long line of lawyers. Not that he was proud of the boy or anything; that wasn't the same thing. For goodness sake; Ursa was having a strange effect on him, he cursed in his mind.

* * *

><p>Katara got home particularly tired - maybe it was the rush from the ride on Zuko's motorbike, or the adrenaline from that game of Truth Or Dare dying down, but she was absolutely exhausted. She walked into the kitchen, cautious as ever. She hadn't stalked proudly into her kitchen since before her kidnapping. Maybe it was warranted, but it still bothered her.<p>

_'It's a terrible feeling, you know; to not be able to feel safe in your own home,' _she heard Zuko's voice in the back of her head, that time on the beach after she'd found out about his suicide attempt. Now she really understood what he'd meant.

She stopped at one end of the kitchen, staring at the pinkish stain on the white stone floor. Her blood. She'd gotten home after being in hospital and then had to clean up her own blood from the floor. She couldn't think of anything more morbid than that.

A shiver ran down Katara's spine, and she instantly turned from the kitchen and set about locking all the doors, shutting all the windows and closing all the curtains. She wanted to be alone right now. Something rolled off her tongue, "Zuko," without her mind's permission, and she didn't question it. Once the house was secured, Katara slowly made her way upstairs to read her book.

Maybe the great and mighty Stephen King could help her wait this out.

As she climbed the central staircase, Katara heard a fluttering noise from above her head, and instinctively ducked and looked up. She groaned at the realization she came to. There were more bats in the attic. They really needed to keep a better standard of living than this. There was a hole in the roof allowing bats and birds in. Katara approached the door that led up into the attic.

Unlike Zuko's attic, there were no skylights to let light in, so once gravity pulled the slanted door shut behind her, Katara squinted in the dark to make her way up the flight of rickety stairs into the main storage area. A small amount of light came in through the hole causing all the trouble, but Katara still couldn't see much. She gasped out when her foot made contact with something and she went toppling to the floor, which gave a protesting moan under her weight.

How many corners had they _cut _when they built this house?

Bats screeched out and flew over Katara's head, blindly fluttering and sending out sonic waves to find their way to the hole in the roof. Katara finally opened her eyes to adjust her weight, having landed right on her bad arm. She sat up and cradled her elbow protectively, checking the trembling to see if it was getting any better. When she noticed that it _was _getting better, she reached out in the dark for what she'd tripped on.

A box of old books?

Katara whipped out her cell-phone to light the box and saw, written on its side in beautiful black sharpie handwriting, 'Diaries #3'. That wasn't her father's writing, or even her grandmothers. It was her mother's. She pawed at the box and dragged it closer, then grabbed one of the books from it. A spider crawled over her hand and then disappeared into the darkness. Katara ignored this.

She flipped open the book.

_'… But still, I suppose there's no harm in allowing him to **hope **__I'll say yes. I don't know, should I say yes? Is marriage really plausible right now? I have my education to think of - and my future, too. Kelly's divorce is going through this month. As it is, one of Hakoda's friends recommended her lawyer. After how her marriage has ended, I wonder if I could keep one together._

_'I know, she tells me to go and 'fucking shrink myself' every time I try to talk to her about the miscarriage, but I can't help but worry about her. I love her. She's the closest thing I have to a sister, and I'll die before I see her throw herself into her studies to escape the harsh reality of losing the baby. It was a boy. She was going to name him Joshua. Since the miscarriage, everything Kelly feels for Benjamin is dust._

_'At least I'm taking Kelly's advice. I'm 'fucking shrinking myself'. So far I've pieced together that I'm extremely sexually repressed; not like Hakoda hasn't said that before. Either way, it's none of his business. He's going home anyway, even if he says he can get a job here. In New York? Yeah, sure; good luck with that! We'll never be anything than an old romance we look back on when we're old and gray. We're too different …'_

Katara put the book down and blinked in the dark, the light from her phone having gone out. Her mother's journals were here before her, dusty and cobwebbed, but very much here. Katara took the one in her hand and got up, searching for the staircase down. She would read this, and then she would move to the next. The Tower would have to wait.

Maybe, just maybe, she could find out more about her mother's murderer.

* * *

><p>Suki snorted a scolding laugh at Sokka and Toph, who were balancing on the local train tracks just outside of the urban areas, with their arms out like wings. Sokka kept his eyes down to be sure he kept his balance, and Toph kept her eyes up proudly, blindly and expertly maneuvering her feet along one rail of the tracks. Aang watched her move with the grace and deliberation of a dancer, though thought she looked more like a warrior moving into battle, in her own right.<p>

"But," Sokka was saying, "that doesn't mean she's just going to let us off without a hitch; I mean, the woman's been trying to make our lives hell since she started working at the school. And no doubt, she's pissed she lost her job."

Suki agreed without hesitation, "She'll probably be the biggest bitch ever tomorrow; last day on the job. Maybe we should all just skip school tomorrow."

"And miss the school drama committee screwing up 'Needful Things'? No way," Sokka sniggered from his perch on the train tracks.

Aang and Suki were walking alongside the tracks on the side of it that was flat enough to walk on - the other side went down a steep hill of forestry that ended in a shallow brook of tranquil, running water. It was nice down there, but a bitch to climb back up, Aang recalled.

"So we'll go, and just stand our ground, right?" Toph raised an eyebrow at Sokka from her spot on the tracks, "It's our school. Not hers."

Sokka agreed without saying anything, before addressing a different matter; "So, do you guys believe what Katara and Zuko say? That they're not … involved?"

"No way."

"Nuh-uh."

"Not unless hell froze over last night …"

Sokka pulled his mouth to one corner of his face and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "What do you think _is _going on between them?" he asked, a twinge of protectiveness in his voice, "you think he screwed her? Because from my end, it looks like they got busy and Katara thought it was more than it really was …" he felt his jaw setting.

"Except that she maintains the 'I'm a virgin' story without fail or falter," Aang pointed out calmly.

Toph's eyes shut and she took a careful, blind step forward, and it landed perfectly in front of her. "And she sucks at lying," she added, "So you know she's not lying."

"And I thought you and Zuko were friends," Suki eyed Sokka suspiciously, "Don't you trust him?"

"I don't trust any guy when it comes to my baby sister. Not after what happened with- whoa, shit!" Sokka's foot slipped off one side of the rail it had been stationed on, and his hands went to his ears at the sound of a loud blaring noise up ahead; the blaring of a train. He tried to get his foot back up on the rail, but something had it stuck where it was. He looked up with wide blue eyes and saw no train, but heard its thrumming engines revving up ahead.

A train was coming at him.

"Guys!" he croaked out, his head snapping to Toph, who was hopping off the tracks to the others, "I'm stuck!" he tugged at his foot, but it was wedged in the rut that the train traveled on. "Agh!" he heard himself crying out, but now he could see the goddamn train and it was coming fast between the trees, with an insidious grin to its headlights.

Suki felt everything in her body just freeze and begin draining down her body. Her eyes darted from Sokka, tugging at his foot, to where the noise of the train was coming from. Toph had turned and was staring in wide panic and wonder, unsure what to do. If anyone went to try to help him, they could get stuck too, or just not get out of the way in time. Sokka was panicking; he was leaning down to crouch, his hands working to pry his foot out of the tracks.

"Fuck-," Toph's choked voice broke off, and she was visibly torn between helping him and staying where it was safe.

The train blared at them, speeding at hundreds of miles an hour.

"Sokka!" Suki shouted, not even having enough time to get her emotions together before she was moving towards him.

Sokka turned his head and screamed at her from where he was stuck on the tracks. "NO!" he threw his arm in her direction, eyes wide; tossing some kind of force field at her that somehow managed to stop her in her tracks - if you pardon the pun. And then Sokka's image was replaced by a blur of yellow and green and white, slashing everything between them in two.

The wind rushed past them at unimaginable speed, and the three stared in the direction of their missing friend, their hands reaching up and grabbing their faces and heads in horror and jarring suspense; any minute now, the train would disappear and Sokka's blood would be smeared across the tracks, his head crushed between them and the flying train. Why couldn't he just have gotten out of the way and let the train take his foot?

He could've lived! Goddamn him, the stupid fuck, he could've _lived! _Suki felt her breath quickening in her throat, and her cheeks wetting themselves with salty water. When had it started raining? It wasn't raining, though it felt like it should've been. No. No, goddamn it, NO! She was breathing so hard she felt like her lungs would give out; everything she should've said … she should've _fucking _said it!

"No," she heard her own voice under the loud whistling of the train blowing past, "No, no, no, no, no …" she chanted, her fingers slipped into her short auburn hair, gripping and twisting in horror, just repeating and chanting the only thing she could think in her head, her breathing shallow and quick, as if imitating the breeze the train brought.

She could hear Toph repeating something along the same lines - Suki knew Toph and Sokka had a relationship similar to that between him and Katara. "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, omigod, omigod …" and she was on the verge of tears too, her hands dangling at her sides. Sokka, who'd been destined to be the Bullets' quarterback, was dead.

Aang was silent, staring, his face between his hands, his gray eyes fixed on the blur of the train.

The train disappeared from view in a millisecond, and they looked for an unmistakable red color that wasn't there. There was a flash of blue in the rut where Sokka's foot had been stuck, and it took them a full fifteen seconds to get the courage to move over and see Sokka's sneaker still there, stuck in the rut. Suki let out a kind of mourning wail of despair, still at odds with what this meant.

"Breathe," Toph pulled herself together to say, and put a hand on Suki's arm.

Suki wanted to turn and tell Toph that she _was _fucking_ breathing, _but she didn't. Instead, she crossed the tracks without even a second thought and began heedlessly running down the steep woodland slope toward the creek, whispering his name under his breath, almost loud enough to be calling out for him, just quiet enough for it to be a spoken thought.

Toph and Aang broke off after her, catching onto her train of thought. When she let out a gasp of surprise from up ahead, the guessed she had found him - or his body. Just because he had gotten his foot out of his shoe didn't mean he was completely unscathed. The two exchanged glances in their awkward downhill running, and then slowed themselves at the sight of Suki running at a flash of mocha skin and muddy blue cloth.

No red in sight.

Suki stared down at Sokka for a moment before falling to her knees and grasping his shirt desperately. He was lying in the brook with a half-frown on his face and one shoeless foot in the air, staring at it in awe. Why the hell wasn't he dead? "That's …" he panted, having rolled all the way down the slope and landed in a stream of water, "the last time … I tie … my shoes …"

The mother of his unborn child stared down at him, pale as a ghost, not finding his revelation in the least bit funny. "You … fucking asshole!" she eventually shouted at him, grabbing his jaw in both hands and then capturing his panting lips with her own. He was caught unawares by this unexpected kiss from his ex-girlfriend, but once the initial surprise dissipated, he returned the kiss, eyes fluttering shut.

Toph stopped where she was, a few feet back from the reunited couple, caught somewhere between relief, disgust and nausea. She hung her head and put her hands on her knees to regain her breath. "Ngh," she panted, if that counted as a word. She stood straight and tucked her thumbs into her pockets, shaking this whole thing off. "Fuck," she murmured, looking on. Aang watched too, still jarred by the near miss.

* * *

><p><em>'… It would seem that mom likes Hakoda. Not just because now she's got a grandbaby on the way, but apparently he's a polite young man with wonderful manners and all that stuff. He's faking it, but it's still cute. He even went out with her to get the firewood. It's all been on her since I went to college, and Dad died, so I suppose it's nice to have someone to help around the place.<em>

_'More importantly, Sokka, as we've decided to name our baby boy, is kicking the shit out of me. He either really likes music or really hates it, because the second I turn on the radio, he starts kicking. Haven't spoken to Kelly in a while; she still hasn't gotten over the miscarriage and here I am bringing in this big fat baby bump to work every morning. God, I feel like a bitch. Hers would've been a boy. He'd have been three years old now._

_'Should I go on about my cravings now, or should I just let them fester in my head? Because I shouldn't have to cater to Kelly in my journals, no matter how bad I feel, and now saying that makes me feel even worse. Maybe I'm just a terrible person. Damn it. Okay, well, anyway, being pregnant was new in itself. The cravings? They're crazy. I'm eating peanut butter out of the jar as I write this. Seriously!'_

Katara paused in her reading to give a laugh - she felt close to her mother. She felt as if they were discussing Sokka's habits for eating out of jars with spoons, right now. And her mother had done that self-scolding thing she did! How cool was that?

_'Note to self - next time I get pregnant I will keep more peanut butter. Or not. I imagine my next pregnancy will have different cravings. Maybe something that won't give me a fat ass like I will when I pop this puppy out. Maybe lettuce, or tomatoes. Ew, no actually, I hate tomatoes. The way I'm eating now is just laziness. I'd probably grab up a raw tomato and bite into it. Gee-ross._

Katara agreed with this. Raw tomatoes were gee-ross.

_'Hakoda wants sex. I've tried the 'carrying your child' excuse but it doesn't seem to put him off. I've even called him an incestuous, homosexual pedophile for wanting to screw me while his son lives in my belly. I mean, come on - thirty-eight weeks pregnant here - does that mean nothing? But at least I can commission foot rubs and massages out of him before saying outright that the baby wants to go to sleep. Goodnight, diary number … what is this, the thirteenth? Whatever. Goodnight. I'm going to get a massage.'_

Katara smiled and put the book down. "Night, mom," she murmured, putting her head back against the wall where she was sat on the floor, one hand loosely holding a bottle of beer. The only person she could fathom having a serious relationship with her father was her mother, so if she was going to talk about ways to get out of sex in her journals, Katara would read along. Maybe they'd help her out one day. Maybe Suki could use her mother's advice on surviving pregnancy.

She lifted her hand and put two fingers to the glass pendant of her mother's necklace.

Still nothing on the killer, but that was probably because Katara was reading through her mother's life; her college days, her wedding, her marriage, her pregnancies, her motherhood … Katara couldn't stop reading. Her mother was so kind and lovely and perfect that she couldn't put down the memoirs to search for the most recent ones.

Katara got to her feet and noticed twilight falling. If she wanted to do something tonight, she'd better head out before it got dark.

* * *

><p>Lydia yawned loudly, cradling the phone to her ear, "I suppose you're right. But I'm so much better at Chemistry than most other students. I'm honestly split between Archaeology and Chemical Research. A lot of students are good at Geography, but it's kind of special the way I am with Chemistry. The math just comes alive."<p>

_"You should do what you love, Lydia. Which class do you enjoy more? Which career can you see fitting you better? Do you want to always be on the move, or do you want to stay in one place? I know it isn't easy to pick between two legacies to which you're the only heir, but I know I only want your happiness, darling."_

Lydia drew her shoulders up, sprawled on one of the chaise lounges in the parlor. "You _do _know how to chat up a lady, don't you, Alistair?" she smirked into the old-fashioned phone.

_"I certainly try. So which do you prefer? Chemicals, or runes?"_

Lydia found this simplification very enlightening. "Chemicals, I s'pose."

_"Well I s'pose you have your answer then," _Alistair chuckled into the phone.

"My father is here to try to win my mother over, god help him, so, do you think I should tell him I've made my decision?"

Alistair seemed to pause, _"Er, my angle is that you only want one thing to spring at him while he's there. That could either be your mother's warranted affair, or your career choice. Maybe you should wait to tell him just yet."_

"Good point. Alright, Alistair, I have to get dressed. There's a good-riddance party going on in the name of my English teacher, the old hag, and I heard there's going to be a piñata. Can't miss that, now can I, love?"

_"No, I suppose not. Chat tomorrow?"_

"Yes. We'll talk tomorrow - call when you get out of class. Bye. Love you."

_"I will. Love you too. Bye."_

* * *

><p>When night finally came down, Toph and Aang were hanging around outside the local nightclub - a neon-decorated, modern building just off the beach with a huge sign that said 'RuMors' in cyan blue century gothic font. The club name was befitting a main spot for so many teenagers. The place was rented for the night; paid for between Azula Scorsese, Dylan Greco, another rich kid by the name of Patrick Sykes, and a girl who went by Alyssa Jackson.<p>

The music was pumping in the background; thumping out Jennifer Lopez' 'On The Floor', featuring Pitbull, and Toph could hear a bunch of kids hanging by the door singing along to the wordless chorus.

Aang had one finger pressed into his ear, and to the other side of his head he held his phone, trying to hear the ringing tone at the other end of the line. When he finally got an answer, he spoke loudly and quickly. "Katara! Hey, where are you? We're waiting outside 'Rumors' for you!"

_"Sorry! I got caught up with something! I'm on my way! Is Sokka there?"_

"No!" Aang cried into the phone, "He and Suki made up! They're busy getting reacquainted!" he joked over the phone.

Katara seemed to pause. _"Okay, alright! I'll be there in fifteen minutes - I just have to pick up some new shoes to match my outfit!"_

Aang's jaw dropped, "You're late because of _shoes?"_

Toph smacked Aang on the back of his head. "Hey! Watch what you say about shoes! I hate fashion, but shoes? Do _not _question the importance they hold to the outfit!" she put one foot out in front of her to show him her high-heeled, brown suede, fur-lined, zip-up knee-high boots. She'd shelled out way too much on them for them to go unnoticed.

Aang was hearing the same kind of thing from Katara on the other end, until she calmed down and said she'd be there soon. He'd never understand the significance of shoes. Honestly, most outfits would go fine _without _shoes - with the exception of formal attire like a tuxedo. "Alright, she'll be here soon."

"Great. Let's dance!" Toph grabbed her boyfriend's arm and tugged him into the club.

* * *

><p>Lydia made her way to the closest sofa to the DJ booth with her martini and sat down, all dressed up with nobody to hang with. Her straightened blonde locks fell casually on her shoulders, and her calves were decorated to the knee by the crisscrossing purple ribbons of her favorite Prada stilettos.<p>

She usually dressed classier than this to go out, but it was a high-school function. So what if she looked a little like everyone else here? Her tight black skirt only came halfway down her thighs, the frills at the bottom tickling her skin every so often, and she wore a short-sleeved, tight, scooped-neckline dark purple t-shirt that matched her shoes, dotted from one corner with brass studs.

Someone sat down next to her on the couch and she turned her head to get a look at them. A smile came over her face. "Hello there, stranger!" she called over the music.

Zuko smiled briefly, taking a sip from his bottle of rum. "Hey, why aren't you dancing?" he called back, music thumping in his ears.

"On my own? Not likely!" she gave a laugh, and lifted her glass to her lips, mentally noting that he seemed to be drinking rather heavily tonight.

The teenager sitting beside her gave a sort of nod, and turned his gaze to the crowd, where he saw Toph and Aang dancing together. He got up again, regarded Lydia with a smile and pushed through the crowd to get to his friends. When he got to them, they were jumping to the music, obviously enjoying themselves. Zuko wondered if he should dampen their mood by bringing his dark cloud to them, and he turned to go back to sit with Lydia.

"Hey, Sparky!" Toph yelled over the noise, her voice bubbly with laughter.

Zuko scoffed a laugh and turned to face them again. "Hi, Toph!" he called, to be heard above the music. Then he looked around them and saw Sokka and Suki were nowhere to be found. "Where are Sokka and Suki?"

"They made up!" Aang answered for him, "I doubt they'll be here tonight!"

Zuko paused the same way Katara had on the phone, as if this complicated things somewhat. "That's great!" he finally exclaimed.

The song faded into the next and Akon was rapping out the first verse of lyrics to 'Sexy Bitch' featuring David Guetta. Some girls jumped up onto their boyfriends backs and pumped their fists in the air, some even high-fiving other girls up above the crowd. With this, Toph got onto Aang's back and extended her hands to the high ceiling of the club, with her index and pinkie fingers raised in rock symbols.

**_'Yes I can see her; cause every girl here wanna be her. Oh she's a diva; I feel the same and I wanna meet her,'_**

Zuko allowed himself to get into the music too; the song was pretty catchy, and the enthusiastic energies of the club patrons were equally so. He didn't dance; at least not usually, because he couldn't really dance all-that well. He could waltz - his mother had made sure of that before she'd left - but odd as it was, he couldn't dance to the actual kind of music he enjoyed.

**_'They say she's low down; it's just a rumor, I don't believe em. They say she gotta slow down, the baddest thing around town …'_**

There was a loud amount of cheering from one side of the club, and Aang struggled to turn with Toph piggybacking on him. Zuko turned a lot quicker and saw that the light technicians were shooting the blue laser lights toward the door. Someone was making a big entrance. Toph shoved Zuko from behind, from her perch on Aang's back as the two began moving through the crowd to see who had just walked in. Zuko pushed people out of the way for them to get through.

**_'She's nothin' like a girl you ever seen before! Nothin' you can compare to you neighborhood whore!'_**

Zuko caught a flash of the blue light in sunglasses, before they got close enough to the new patron for Toph to see who it was from her higher position. She had put her fingers in her mouth and was whistling appreciatively. Zuko looked over his shoulder to exchange glances with Aang, who was just as puzzled as the former. The music had swelled so it seemed as if this 'girl you never seen before' had just walked into the club.

Zuko pushed a few more people out of the way and then he felt his lips parting in surprise at what he saw. Sunglasses. Cut-up denim jeans that had become hotpants on an amazing ass. A tight black tank top with a shiny black leather jacket over it, unzipped to reveal the way the tank top stretched on perky breasts. Expensive leather Gucci booties. Smooth, tanned skin on toned, sleek, long legs. Long brown tresses of wavy chocolate hair.

**_'I'm tryna find the words to describe this girl without bein' disrespectfu-ul!'_**

Time had seemed to pause, and now it was speeding back up again. Katara wore a sexy little smirk on her face and pushed away one of the football players on Sokka's team who was getting a little too close. Her dainty hands had been manicured and moisturized, and one ran up the arm of another potential dance partner, before pushing him away by the shoulder. She was walking and dancing at the same time, her hips swaying rapturously as she moved. Holy _shit._

**_'The way that booty movin', I can't take no more; have to stop what I'm doing so I can pull her close!'_**

And she was enjoying this; the attention was going to her head, but somehow it didn't bother Zuko. She was just indulging herself in a little bit of vanity and excitement. Maybe she needed an ego boost for a change - her confidence just got knocked time and time again, so what was it to him if she was going to have a good time? That blissful little smirk on her face was contagious, because it was breaking out on Zuko too. He almost wanted to help her bat off the guys lingering near, but she didn't look like she needed help.

**_'I'm tryna find the words to describe this girl without bein' disrespectfu-ul! Dayumn girl! Damn, you'se a sexy bitch! A-a sexy bitch! Damn, you'se a sexy bitch- Damn girl!'_**

"Hey, get over here, ya sexy bitch!" Toph cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled to her friend.

Katara laughed out and focused her eyes on Toph through her sunglasses. When she spotted Zuko hanging by them, her smile drooped a little, before lifting up again. The Scorsese boy guessed she was thinking something along the lines of 'aw, shit, there goes my fun night'. "Hey, guys!" she high-fived Toph and smiled at Aang. She regarded Zuko with a polite and friendly smile.

_'One step forward, two steps back' _Zuko heard a niggling little voice in his head. He flinched as if he'd been flicked in the ear, lifting his hand and scratching discreetly. Hopefully nobody had noticed. These fucking noises had been bothering him long enough for him to know it wasn't just somebody nearby talking. Not with a voice like that.

Katara continued in her enthusiastic dancing to the music, one arm up in the air, a lone finger pointed to the ceiling as she bounced on her feet. Her … er, endowments … bounced along with her. Zuko winced and tried his best to look away, distracting as it was. He was rather surprised when Katara snatched his bottle of rum from him and up-ended most of it, before handing it back, grinning.

Zuko figured she'd already been drinking for a lot of the night. Great minds seemed to think alike.

"You know, what?" Katara smacked him on the arm playfully, "Rum is _not_ your drink. Don't you like, um … whiskey?" she drawled once Toph and Aang disappeared.

Zuko shook his head with a small smile. "I like rum too."

Katara continued to wear a shit-eating grin, "Well, see - now I learnt something today, didn't I? You like rum. I didn't know that," she poked him happily, "Oh, and by the way, your psycho friend won't stop bothering me … it's like 'blah-blah-blah, something about a sweater, blah-blah, can I watch you kill yourself …'," she shook her head and eyed his drink. "We need to get me a drink," she thought aloud.

Zuko's lips thinned against each other. "Are you serious? What has he said to you?" he glanced around carefully.

Katara blinked thoughtfully, "Oh, uh, that I wasn't obnoxious. He didn't say much about that, but he had my sweater because I gave it to some kid who was cold in the rain on Saturday night, and that kid turned out to be his little brother, and he just came to give me the sweater back but he was all smug and annoying …" and then she frowned, "I'm probably just overreacting, but I know it's 'no more secrets', so …"

Zuko shook his head. "I'm glad you told me," and he handed her the remains of his drink, "I think you should stop drinking, before you go …" Zuko tried to find the word for it.

"Stupid?" Katara pushed her brows up, "Yeah, good point …" she finished his rum and then put it down on a table nearby.

When a tall, Hispanic boy on the wrestling team approached Katara from behind, Zuko was the first to spot him. He'd only had time to frown before the guy reached out and goosed Katara. Katara yelped and whipped around to glare at the guy, who was grinning at her mischievously. "Wanna dance?" he did a little jig with his eyebrows, which Katara took for innuendo.

Katara raised an eyebrow, "Hey, watch it, _asshole,_" she put a hand on his chest and pushed him back lightly, "Nobody - and I mean, _nobody - _touches my ass without permission," she seethed, half seriously and half jokingly.

Only at this point did the guy seem to notice Zuko standing near Katara and giving him an evil eye, but he ignored it just the same.

He shook off Katara's reply with another smarmy smirk, "Come on, Marina, what good is a nice ass if ya don't let nobody squeeze it-," and he grabbed out to goose her again. This time, Zuko's hand shot out like a bolt of lightning and caught the wrestler around the wrist, his other arm shooting out to the guy's shoulder, turning him and pinning his arm behind his back.

"You walk into a museum," Zuko hissed to the guy threateningly, "you see a painting you like. You look at it. You don't grab it. Apply the same logic to a pretty girl in a club. You don't grab ass. Instead you ask, hey, can I buy you a drink? She says no, you leave her the fuck alone, understand?" the guy winced and whimpered under his breath, "Understand?" he repeated, with a kind of undecipherable smirk on his lips.

Thanks to the dense crowds and loud music, nobody seemed to notice this, and when the guy finally exclaimed that he understood, Zuko let him go and he glared at Katara before taking off. Katara bit her lip and smirked at Zuko, before elbowing him happily. "Whoa, Zuko … where did _that _come from?" she allowed a luminescent blush onto her cheeks.

Zuko just smiled wanly at her, and she got the basic idea.

* * *

><p>Sokka slept on his side with an arm draped over Suki, who lay on her back, hands tucked under her head, eyes shut. This was so fucking stupid. She'd split from him, convinced it was the best thing to do for herself. He was a great guy, too. She just knew that men were a lot of work, and she had her hands full right now. She had to drop out of school, and get some kind of job to pay for things; she couldn't expect Katara to pay her medical bills forever.<p>

And now she had Sokka to think about. Suki wondered, briefly, if it would've been less complicated if she were carrying, for argument's sake, Dylan's child instead of Sokka's. Then Sokka would just dump her, unable to handle things - and he did often prove unable to handle certain things, and she couldn't blame him for it - and she wouldn't have to go through the long and grueling complications of explaining the situation.

She shouldn't have done this. She had been set to do this on her own, but now she owed him honesty. She'd owed him nothing when they were apart. Blinking open her eyes, Suki looked to the father of her child.

Sokka stirred in his sleep, pressing his face between the pillow and Suki's bare arm. He breathed in her smell and a smile came over his face. Suki watched him intently, and then when he stilled, she sighed out into the air, reached for his arm on her waist and slid it back toward him until his hand rested on the curving shape of her growing belly, intertwining her fingers with his.

"Dear Cookie," she whispered into the room, "Today your daddy and me got back together," she shut her eyes, writing a letter aloud, "But I didn't tell daddy about you, because I'm afraid of what he'll think. I can't expect him to drop college to look after us; he got into Yale, you know. His daddy went to Yale when he was his age. Maybe you'll go to Yale too, when you grow up. Crap, I need to write this down …"

Suki groaned and shook her head on the pillow. She wanted to write a letter to the Cookie now - on paper. She wanted to write down everything she knew about Sokka, so that when she couldn't think much about him, five, ten, fifteen years down the line, Cookie could read the letter her/his mother had written, and learn a little about their father. Suki sat up and glanced to Sokka's desk.

She lifted the sheets and swung her legs out, grabbing for her panties on the floor.

And then a cool hand caught hers and she gasped. Sokka had been awake the whole time.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Okay, so my story had had like, no happiness in ages. And the chapters are getting too long. Seriously, the first chapter was 3000 words long. My last chapter was 15,000 words long. So, er, yeah, I'm takin' my brother's advice and lightening up. It's turned into such heavy reading that I'm losing readers, and I'm losing my own enthusiasm with it. Except, this chapter was fun to write.**

**Spoiler for next chapter? Hmm… Okay!**

**- We find out how Sokka's reacting to the Cookie.****Donovan is a bitch.****Lydia meets Aidan.****Dylan Greco lashes out, and ultimately gets his ass kicked.****The Circus comes to town.****We meet Mr. O'Leary.****The drama committee ruins 'Needful Things'.****Suki breaks down.****Toph realizes just how dangerous Aang's past is.****Zuko talks to Iroh and Ursa about Ozai ****-**** And much more!**

**Now then! I'm really enjoying getting into Kya's diaries; I imagine they would be really important to Katara. Also, I haven't had a cliffhanger in so long! I like that last line right there. Plus, Lu Ten is getting married! Wedding time! I love Lu Ten. I've needed to get into the Ursa/Ozai stuff for a while, so Ozai's sudden interest in Zuko's carrying on the family tradition is my gateway.**

**I hope Katara gets that horse she likes, but I don't see how she can. :(**

**Oh, and to readers of my other stories, I promise to get writing on them as soon as I can. I particularly want to work on 'Lotus', 'In The Crossfire' and 'The Passenger'.**

**ZOMG 200 REVIEWS! 200! Holy rusted metal, Batman! TWO HUNDRED! That's amazing! I love you guys!**


	19. Smoke Through A Keyhole

"Hey!" came a call from down the hall, as Katara got her books for her first class out of her locker. It was Toph, approaching with Zuko. "Who's genius fucking idea was it to write 'Batman was here' on me?" Toph pushed up the sleeve of her gray hoody to reveal blue felt-tip ink on her forearm.

Katara grinned, "Maybe someone with an affinity for dark clothes, masks and saving random people in the street," she offered Zuko a smug look.

Zuko rolled his eyes. "Oh, ha-ha," he answered darkly, before fixing a serious look in Katara's direction, "Hey, have you spoken to Suki since yesterday? I tried calling, but she didn't answer the phone."

Katara's expression softened to a concerned frown at this information, glancing down to the sling holding her left arm in place. She trained her eyes on Toph. "Didn't you say she and Sokka made up yesterday? Weren't they together last night?" she bit her lip. That didn't sound too good.

Toph crossed her arms over her chest and shut her eyes nonchalantly, "Well, officer, I saw _something, _but I can't be sure that was the guy who did it …"

Zuko grunted. "Don't fuck around, Toph, this is serious!" he elbowed the shorter girl in the upper arm.

The blind bandit groaned and stuck her tongue out distastefully. "Alright, alright, sheesh, Sparky; I was just teasing," she tucked her hands into the pouch of her hoodie, "but yeah, after Sokka nearly got hit by a train, she went all Shakespeare on him. You know; 'oh, darling, I've just realized I cannot live without you' Shakespearean. Like the way Lydia Roberts talks."

Katara nodded thoughtfully, exchanged calm glances, and thought for a moment, before the both of them felt their jaws drop and turned their gazes on Toph. "What?"

"Sokka-,"

"-Got hit …"

"Near-ly …"

"Hit by a-,"

"TRAIN?"

Toph watched as the two fell into silence with a calm, placid expression. "You two done?" she leant against the wall of lockers and flicked at her bangs carelessly. They just stared at her with hard expressions. Good enough for her. "Yeah. We were hanging by the tracks and Sokka got his foot caught just as a train was coming. We thought he got squashed, but it turned out he got his foot out of his shoe."

Zuko shook his head. "But after all that, you haven't heard anything else from them?"

Toph shrugged and blinked at them. "Nope."

Katara sighed heavily, "I have Biology next. I'll ask Suki what's up," she glanced from Toph to Zuko, afforded Zuko a tiny smile more than how she regarded Toph - and Toph caught this - and then turned back to her locker to get her Biology book. Zuko fixed his eyes on the inside of her locker; on a picture pinned to the door.

"Hey, what's that?" he asked, stepping to get a better look, inadvertently letting a breath bounce off the skin of her bare shoulder. The photograph was of a horse; a beautiful animal with large patterns of white on it, and a thick, full mane of windswept hair. It's eyes were a dark brown, cold and hateful, but still perplexing. He put a hand on the locker next to Katara's to look closer.

Katara felt her cheeks flash pink with Zuko's closeness, and embarrassment at having the picture. "Oh … it's just this horse Song McFarlane's father selling. I don't know why I stuck it there, I just liked it …" she trailed off, involuntarily lifting a cool hand to her heated cheek and glancing back to Zuko. Zuko smiled at her.

"See, now I learnt something. I didn't know you were getting a horse."

Katara laughed nervously and shut her locker, causing Zuko to step back from her personal bubble. "I'm not. I just … like it," she drew her good shoulder up, having trained herself not to move the other - it was injured and healing. She'd let it heal, or risk the wrath of scowly Zuko.

Zuko's smile faded momentarily, but then he pulled a pensive expression. "Walk you to class?" he offered amicably.

Toph smirked knowingly. "I gotta get to class too. I'll see you two later, 'kay?" and she turned to leave. Toph disappeared into the chattering crowd of milling students.

Zuko watched as Toph vanished from sight and then gestured with his head in the direction of Katara's biology class; he knew where it was because he had the same teacher, though he was in the Senior set for it. Mr. Piandao was a good teacher - and there was a shortage of those in this school. The buzzer went off and the crowds thinned until they were walking alone in the halls.

"Katara," Zuko cleared his throat awkwardly, lifting a hand to the back of his neck, "I uh … I actually wanted to apologize to you."

Katara paused and frowned in confusion, before the corner of her mouth tilted up. "For what?"

Zuko drew in a long breath, "For being a jerk to you; on the highway, and in Los Angeles. I shouldn't have directed my anger at you. What happened wasn't your fault, and I promise I'm going to make it up to you, okay?" he averted his gaze from her and felt his good cheek get warmer for a moment. "I'm sorry."

Katara smiled absentmindedly and reached out with her good hand to take his in hers. Nobody was around to see, but she just wanted to hold his hand for a moment. "Apology accepted, Zuko. You don't have to make it up to me; I'm just glad we can talk to each other the way we used to be able to."

The corners of Zuko's mouth tugged upward. "And there's one more thing," he swallowed, "… thank you for hauling my ass out of there. I didn't say thanks, and I should've. I've been a total asshole to you."

Katara smirked. "Yeah," she answered after a short pause. "You have," she squeezed his hand, and tilted her head to shoot him a playful scolding look.

In that moment, Zuko wanted especially to kiss her, but he wondered whether she still wanted him to kiss her. She could easily say he was forgiven, but that wasn't the same as actually being forgiven. He had said some really horrible things to her; especially one really bad one after getting home that she'd cared not to mention, or even think about. They'd been yelling over Katara having been dumb enough to get shot.

Katara had told him he was a heartless bastard - she was shot and all he cared about was saying pointless, sharp words to cut at her until she gave up on it. She'd told him she was through letting people talk her out of things because of their opinions; she'd been done with it the night she touched a gun for the first time.

Zuko had told her he didn't care that she was shot. If she wanted pity she should go home and cry to her mommy. And then in a sardonic, evil tone; _"Oh, wait!" _and then he'd just glared at her, remorseless and hateful.

Katara had slapped him; hard, across the good side of his face, and left for home before he could see her cry.

Looking back, Zuko didn't blame her. "I'm sorry for the things I said. I'm sorry … for what I said about your mother."

She just blinked and swallowed, and looked away, thinking about that. "Yeah," was all she said, and her hand loosened on his. "You should be," her tone had changed from friendly to serious in a matter of seconds. She stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. He frowned in confusion, releasing her hand and gazing into her deep, ocean-blue eyes, searching for something. "Zuko, I asked you once if you would help me find them. You never answered me."

Zuko didn't need to ask to know who she was talking about. He sighed and looked away, mulling this over briefly. Eventually he returned his golden gaze to her blue one and lifted a hand to push a strand of her hair from her face. Her throat twitched as though she had swallowed, or was holding her breath. "Katara … it's dangerous. They're ruthless killers, and they were smart enough to get away with it. You don't know that it's even safe to _try_ to find them."

Katara's brows tilted as if she'd realized what he meant. "I know that. I know what they are. They're _monsters," _she paused and swallowed, her eyes glinting with pleading and her good hand catching his again.After a short while, she ran her tongue over her lower lip and she continued. "… Please, Zuko, I- … I _need_ this. You _know_ I need this," she moved her cheek against where his hand had hovered at her ear.

She was right. Zuko knew how badly she needed this. She would go for it even without his help, and he wasn't about to let her do it on her own. "I know," he breathed, and brushed her cheek with his thumb, smiling sadly, "Alright. I'll help you." He clutched her to his chest and squeezed his arms around her. She shuddered in his grasp as if she were crying.

He just hoped he could do for her what she had done for him after Sunday night.

* * *

><p>Zuko and Aang caught up with one another after their first lesson, and walked toward the running track; Dahlia Coast high had a few options for Gym class, two of which you had to pick from - for the boys, they offered track running, football, wrestling, soccer and baseball. Zuko rather preferred to keep his fighting skills secret from people, so that when he hit them and sent their head spinning, they didn't fucking see it coming. So he didn't like football or wrestling. And Soccer was for pansies.<p>

Zuko had chosen baseball and track at the start of Senior year, being one hell of a fucking batter, and Aang, being one fast motherfucker, had advanced to the Senior running sets after outrunning Zuko, before they'd made nice-nice. Aang's two choices happened to be track and soccer. Toph called him Twinkletoes, fancy feet, and a few other names on account of his prowess within the game. Anyway, that was not the point.

"Hey, Scorsese! Tyson!"

Ah … shit.

Zuko and Aang looked at each other, and then over their shoulders, and saw Dylan Greco and some guys from the football, wrestling and soccer teams, apparently having gathered up forces, standing about ten yards across the empty hall from them, arms crossed over varsity jackets, some with baseball caps turned on their side, or backwards, others with pants hanging halfway down their thighs.

Zuko was reminded of a Stephen King story called 'Low Men In Yellow Coats'. These guys looked like the low men, without the yellow coats. There wasn't anything ominous about them; they were just low. Zuko couldn't have said he understood it, but that was the vibe he got.

He turned his head back to Aang, and both boys pushed their brows up suspiciously.

"What do you want?" Aang turned fully to face them tucking his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants.

Dylan smirked, and the expression was ugly with his oddly misshapen cheekbone. "Sokka Marina. I want back at him for what he did to my face."

Zuko raised his good brow skeptically. "And you're talking to us … why?" he turned fully and cocked his head one way, his expression implying that he thought Dylan a complete and total moron. And he did; the guy was a total tool, and an asshole, and a lot of very unpleasant names that could make a mother cover her kid's ears.

Greco's smirk dropped and he tucked his hands into the pockets of his varsity jacket, his feet shoulder width apart and his jaw clenched. "I want his locker combination. One of you is gonna talk," he stated through gritted teeth, seeming to be sure of this statement.

Aang's lips parted in mock surprise. "You thought of that all by yourself? Have you had a gold star yet?"

Zuko gave a laugh and whapped Aang on the arm amicably for this, impressed with his quick insult. Aang was quick on the track and quick with words. It took Greco a moment to get the insult, and when he did, he wasn't impressed. Zuko smirked and shook his head, amused by this. "You're assuming, Greco, that both of us knows his combination."

And then an idea occurred to Zuko and Aang at the same time.

"But only one of us does," Aang followed up.

Dylan Greco actually took a step backward in his state of mindfuckage. "Huh?"

Zuko pulled up one corner of his mouth into a cocky smirking grin. "One of us knows Sokka's combination. And the other one is a liar."

The boys hanging behind Greco actually reached up to scratch their heads, realizing Greco had to pick which one gave him a combination number. Aang wasn't really one to gamble, but this was too much fun. He imagined Zuko had something planned in the event that Greco picked either of them. As it was, Aang didn't know the combination, but even if he had, he wouldn't have told anyone.

Dylan slowly outstretched his arm and pointed at Zuko. "You know it. What's the combination?" he demanded seriously.

Zuko's grin widened. "I'm the liar," and then he chuckled, once, "… and neither of us knows the combination."

Chuckling, Aang and Zuko turned away and moved further down the hall toward the locker rooms. Greco balled his fists at his sides; he wasn't going to have some walking freakshow and a Junior fuck around with him; nobody made a fool of him. He was the quarterback of the school's senior football team - he was the most popular guy in the whole fucking school, and he wasn't about to let them get away without any repercussions.

"Hey, Scarface!" Dylan shouted down the hall, "If you won't tell me, I guess that Kyoshi whore will!" his lips curled immediately into a malevolent little grin, hitting a nerve with the two boys walking away. They were loyal to their friends, and he knew they had no choice but to stop.

Zuko stopped in his tracks, and then so did Aang, both turning with their laughter gone and serious glares shot in the quarterback's direction. The two exchanged glances, using a kind of psychic telemetry formed through friendship to decide who got the first strike. Aang's gaze was polite and offering; _'go ahead; I've got the non-violence thing.' _Zuko's gaze was dark and determined, _'don't mind if I do. I'll buy you a drink later on.' _They weren't about to let anybody talk about Suki like that.

Dylan strolled toward them with a grin on his face, thinking he had it all figured out. He'd just threaten to tell the whole school that he'd done Suki Kyoshi, and make up a few little white lies about it, like that she'd taken it up the ass, or that she'd taken cash to suck him off, or whatever, and her friends would jump to save her that kind of social death. "Now, then, you want to talk now?" he towered over the kid, taller by six inches than him, and met the other one's golden eyes squarely, perhaps only an inch taller.

Zuko smiled a faux smile at the quarterback and nodded as if in defeat, then reeled his fist back. The dull thud of bony flesh on flesh filled the air and confusion erupted in the hall. The scarred teen got in two or three good punches before the quarterback's friends ran to his aid. Zuko heard Greco groan out from a punch that Zuko hadn't delivered, and he guessed Aang was putting his vow of non-violence aside for a little while.

Then one of the kids on the wrestling team, with his pants starting under his ass cheeks and a hat turned backwards on his head slammed his fist into Zuko's ribs and the Scorsese went tumbling back. If he'd hit the floor, he could've rolled and gotten to his feet and entered combat mode again, but one of the boys grabbed him by the arm, holding it behind his back so the one with the backwards hat could get another punch into Zuko's gut.

Aang caught this out the corner of his eye as he dodged a punch aimed at his head. Dodging was his strong suit. Avoidance. Escapism. Aang was good at things like that. He slipped one hand into an airbending form - a knife-edge - and quickly knifed it into a vulnerable spot under the ribs of the one punching Zuko. He clutched at his middle as if he couldn't breathe. Aang knew he couldn't, and wouldn't until he got on the floor. Aang kicked this one down and he stayed down, terrified of not being able to breathe.

Being distracted with getting Zuko free, Aang had gotten a smack in the mouth from another guy. He was lucky it wasn't a punch. Aang had a single moment to think between the smack and the punch that followed it. In that moment, he realized something key to their survival. They were outnumbered. Even an airbender- even the Avatar had to admit that sometimes, at least without his powers activated.

There was disorganized fighting, thuds and smacks and all manner of graceless grunts as fists and hands and feet were thrown around. Zuko ducked past an arm swinging his way and ran a few feet down the hall, away from the scuffle. "Aang, come on!" he yelled, his lip split and blood bubbling up on it, seeming to have caught on to the same thing as Aang. Zuko's cheek was cut just below his scar.

Aang didn't get away as unscathed as Zuko. His nose was running blood and one of his eyes was beginning to swell up from a punch. He suddenly felt particularly claustrophobic. His getaway wasn't as clean as Zuko's - he tripped on the guy on the floor and hit the wooden flooring with a thud, on his front. Someone kicked him from above, in the ribs. He heard a thud and a groan, and then Zuko had grabbed his friend by the arm and roughly grabbed him up to his feet.

"Run!" Zuko was yelling, pulling Aang at a run so fast Aang had to throw his legs to keep from getting dragged.

"Get them!" Dylan Greco screamed out from behind them through a mouthful of blood.

Aang picked up the pace, despite the visibility in his right eye getting worse with swelling, his legs carrying him slightly faster than Zuko was able to run. The two turned a corner, reminding themselves not to look back - that slowed you down. Around the corner, they raced down a stairwell, emerged in the math corridor and saw the nurse's office at the end. "In there!" Aang cried loudly.

The two ran like the wind, metaphorically speaking, and Zuko only barely managed to get the handle of the door down before the two slammed into it and landed in a pile of arms and legs on the school nurse's floor. Needless to say, she wasn't impressed. They quickly clambered to their feet and shut the door behind them. Aang gave the nurse a nervous smile, and raised hand to wave at her.

The nurse's name was Samantha Donohue. She was in her early thirties; an attractive woman too for her age. Rumor had it that she had screwed some of the more mature boys in Senior year. She got to her feet from where she sat on a stool near an examination bed and put her hands on her hips. "What happened to you?" she eyed Aang skeptically.

Aang smiled nervously. "I er … ran into a door. A couple times."

"He has really bad spacial awareness," Zuko added in a mellow tone.

There was some shouting from out in the hall; sounds of wonder and anger and general 'where the fuck did they go' inflections. Samantha sighed and rolled her eyes. "You," she looked at Aang, "Stay here, until I say you can go. That eye is swelling up like a balloon," she pulled a face, and then looked to Zuko. "You can wait here until they leave, and then get to class, got it?"

Zuko nodded agreeably, patting Aang on the arm. Samantha motioned to Aang to get on the examination bed and she grabbed the door of a mini-fridge, drawing out an ice pack and putting it on his eye. Aang winced at the coolness, and Zuko checked through the keyhole to be sure that Dylan and his lot were gone. They were leaving around the corner. He'd wait a while longer, just to be-

"Alright, Scorsese, get out. Unless you want a vaccination."

Zuko immediately grabbed his own upper arm, remembering the last time he'd had vaccinations through the school with a comical grimace. Without a word, he slipped out of the room and raced back up the stairs to take the detour towards the locker room.

* * *

><p>During Katara's first lesson, Suki showed up late, with a note from her father as to why she was tardy. Mr. Piandao told her to sit down and start taking notes on the documentary they were watching on biology. Suki sat down next to Katara with a sheepish look on her face. Katara tore out a piece of paper in her notebook and scrawled down in hurried handwriting; <em>'You OK?'<em>

Suki glanced at the piece of paper, then at Katara, and just shook her head mildly. Katara's brows tilted up and the put an arm around her friend, patted her on the arm and let go before anyone made any fucking lesbian jokes. This school sucked ass. Katara put Suki's lateness down to hormones and morning sickness. She put her friend's sadness and depression to her idiotic brother.

Sokka also sucked ass.

Katara scribbled again on the paper, this time drawing instead of writing; a little silly face with rolling eyes and a goofy grin, and passed it to Suki. Suki gave a tiny giggle, and it seemed to cheer her up for a moment, before she slid it back and turned back to the documentary. Piandao was reading a book at his desk, occasionally looking up to be sure that the students were paying attention.

When the class ended, with Piandao telling them to use their notes to label the diagram he handed out, everyone, including the teacher, left the room, and Katara caught Suki by the hand and stopped her from leaving. Suki seemed grateful for this, and when Katara shut the door, she seemed even more relaxed. Katara drew in a long breath, and Suki drew a shaky one.

"Something's wrong," Katara pointed out, concerned, "I heard you and Sokka were together last night … is everything okay? Are you worried about him finding out-,"

"No," Suki interrupted her sister, "He already found out," her voice tumbled over a heavy lump in her throat and she sniffled, desperately trying not to burst out in tears, her face twisting to a pained and agonized expression. "I was t-talking to my … myself … and … it was so stu-stupid and he was awake and … and …" she hiccupped and a tear spilled from one eye.

Katara's face contorted in sadness, sympathy glinting in her eyes. She said nothing, but threw her arms around Suki and squeezed her tight. Suki buried her face in the younger girl's shoulder and her body wracked with a sob of despair. Katara didn't need to know how Sokka was reacting; this was what was important. Obviously her brother hadn't reacted well, and that was what had Suki in pieces.

Suki had been so strong, and she'd fallen in love with the baby growing in her belly and now Sokka had come along and thrown the blanket of seriousness over it. Suki wanted to be able to say she didn't care about what Sokka thought, but she cared too much about him for it to be true. Suki cared what he thought. She cared what he thought about his baby growing in her womb. If she didn't, she wouldn't be in bits in Katara's arms right now.

"Oh, Suki," Katara squeezed Suki tight.

Words just made it worse, and Suki cried harder into Katara, unable to stop herself from shaking. She was terrified of this. Suki kept thinking that if she'd told Sokka, if she'd had a better handle on how he'd found out, he might have reacted differently, but in all reality, there was no way it could've gone well. Katara hugged onto her sister and vowed she'd slap her brother silly the next time she saw him.

* * *

><p>"I love the first day on a lot," Sang murmured, standing in the sunshine as the tents went up, his hands on his hips. Crowds were milling around, waiting for the rides to open up, but the real crowds came once school hours were over; kids loved this stuff. Sang was reminded how his life had turned out. This wasn't a life for a grown man. He remembered when his daughter was younger; how embarrassed she'd been that her father worked in the circus.<p>

"Who doesn't?" one of the Rough Rhinos - Mongke - smirked from atop his prized rhinoceros, who he'd named Betty.

Sang nodded in the morning sunlight that bounced off his reflective black leotard. "Know anything about this town?"

Mongke tilted his head thoughtfully, "The Blue Spirit and the Painted Lady hang around here. Don't you watch TV?"

"Not if I can help it. I know who they are, though. Think one of 'em might be looking for a job in my area?" Sang smiled hopefully.

With a chuckle, Mongke shook his head. "Keep looking, Sang. I doubt you'll get a superhero to work in a circus, but you'll find someone."

Sang turned and looked at the cityscape around the grass lot the circus had rented. It was right in the heart of the city. They'd get a great bout of customers today, and tomorrow. "I can hope. Hope's all we got, sometimes."

Mongke patted his rhino quite lovingly. "Mm," he agreed.

* * *

><p>Lydia sat up in her bed and ruffled her hair thoughtfully. Oh, crap. She'd gotten so carried away last night that she'd totally forgotten about school. Well, nothing to do about it now. She plucked the heavy arm off her waist and lay it down next to the boy lying on his stomach next to her. He was handsome, she remembered; a bad-boy. Sexy. Anarchism wasn't really her thing, but it made for great sex.<p>

She swung her legs out of the bed and grabbed a pair of business trousers. She slipped them on without the panties laid over her lampshade, hoping she could get to school before her English lesson. She had to see Donovan on her last day teaching. Just to see her defeated; to tell herself that after all the crap the woman had put people through in that class, she was going and they were staying. She had to attend a triumph.

"You goin' commando?" the boy who she'd thought to be asleep next to her murmured groggily, amused.

Lydia glanced over her naked shoulder at him. Alan, wasn't it? Andy? Adam? The guy wasn't really all that drunk. He was just extremely exhausted from all the tricks Lydia had learnt from her short time in America as a slut. Being a slut was a fair bit of fun. Sex was more enjoyable when you didn't have to worry about commitments with it. "I've forgotten your name," she stated plainly and stately, despite being topless.

"Aidan," the guy snapped distastefully, as if every girl in the world should know him by name. "Aidan Riker," he added for effect.

Lydia made a 'hmph' noise as if mildly interested, and got up turned and yawned, stretching her arms to the ceiling and displaying a toned and gorgeous chest and abdomen; round full breasts and a tiny waist. The guy - Aidan - watched this with wonder. Lydia would've thought he'd never seen a woman before, though he'd disproved this theory in bed the night prior. "Well, Aidan Riker, you really ought to be getting lost now."

Toph Bei Fong would've told her she didn't grasp the 'get lost' insult quite yet.

Aidan's face drooped in shock. "Huh?" he got up, and pulled his jeans on over his underwear, turning and facing her across the bed, not quite getting what she was saying. Was she … blowing him off? This chick had pulled a one-nighter on _him? _No. No way. No _fucking _way. Aidan pulled the one-night-stands on women. He'd been sure the night before he'd had this girl hooked on him.

"You heard me. Hit the road, Jack," she put her hands on her hips, her chest still very much on display. She actually smirked this time, as she grabbed the lacy, black and green bra from its place draped on her lamp. She expertly got the bra on with the experience of her years in one, and turned away from the guy in the bed, stalking to her sofa and grabbing a white work shirt from it. She pulled it on and buttoned it just to between her breasts.

Aidan stepped up onto the bed, then crossed it and stepped down, moving toward where she stood by the sofa. He slid hand across her hip, but like a mother scolding a child, he plucked it off and dropped it at his side. He scowled hard and grabbed her this time. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You were all over me last night," he hissed in her ear.

Lydia rolled her eyes and hissed back into his, "Because I wanted to be," she caught his earlobe in her teeth and tugged it gently, her tongue toying with it tauntingly.

He gave a startled grunt as if he hadn't been expecting this. He let go and took a few steps back, staring at her. "You're a schizo. You have to be," he frowned hard at her as if she would suddenly reveal her true identity as some kind of dual-persona demon.

Lydia just pushed her brows up stately and blinked carelessly. "You can let yourself out."

And she left Aidan standing there, part in horror, part in wonder.

* * *

><p>Katara slipped into her seat next to Zuko in her English class about three minutes late. She was lucky she got there before Donovan did. She glanced at him and noticed the cut on his cheek, and his split lip. She pulled a face. "What happened to you?" she murmured carefully.<p>

"Dylan Greco," he growled indignantly, as if whatever fight had given him those cuts hadn't been completely finished, "Aang's in the nurse's office," he added darkly, before he turned his face to Katara and saw those blue eyes sparkling with some kind of concern in them. "Did you find Suki?" he breathed, his voice barely above a whisper.

Katara's expression softened. "She's really upset. Sokka found out."

Zuko grimaced at this and then shook his head, before the door burst open and Donovan stormed in, a cloud of hate surrounding her head, if that were possible. She groaned aloud and stormed for the desk at the front of the room, dropping a large stack of books down on it. Zuko suddenly remembered he'd left his father's book on copyright law in his locker. That was a dumb move. He'd carry it in his bag from now on, heavy as it was.

Katara reached down into her bag, drew out her English book, put it on the table and drew a souvenir pen from Los Angeles from her jacket pocket. Donovan grabbed up one book and held it up for the whole class to see what it was. The kids at the back couldn't read the name on it, but she didn't really give a shit. Nobody had expected otherwise.

"Jet," she pointed to the back of the class, "Collect Monday's homework."

Jet pulled a face but got up, slipped past Sokka and started rounding up the pieces on Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. Katara and Zuko exchanged glances; they'd been on the road on Monday. They hadn't been in for the homework. The two played a discreet game of rock-paper-scissors under the table and the loser put their hand up in the air. Zuko cleared his throat to get Donovan's attention.

"We weren't here on Monday," he stated plainly.

Donovan smacked the book in her hands back down on the others. "And where _were _you?" she snapped, hands racing to the rolls of fat on her hips. "What, really, was so important that you couldn't attend school?" she ground her teeth and narrowed her eyes.

Zuko put his hand down and tried to think of a plausible lie, while Katara jumped to it without hesitation. "Why is it any of your business?" she raised an eyebrow, plucking up her pen and rolling it along her knuckles carelessly, "for all you know we were volunteering at a homeless shelter, or sitting in hospital while a family member was in surgery."

Ms. Donovan glared at the Marina girl. "I don't care if you were. You two will stay after class to do the assignment, is that clear?"

Zuko scoffed indignantly, "You can't do that - we have other classes to go to," he pointed out calmly, adamant of this.

Donovan just stood straighter and crossed her arms over her chest, "I've just about had it with you two thinking you more about teachers rights than I do. If I see fit to keep you after class, I will. I don't care whether Harvard thinks you're a catch, or if _Miss Marina_ thinks you're a _catch_," she tugged a smirk onto her face as the class laughed, "I don't. A grade average, Mr. Scorsese, can change in a heartbeat with a single 'F'."

Zuko struggled to keep a calm face as the class giggled at Donovan's joking about him and Katara, his blood boiling that she would even threaten to jeopardize his partial scholarship. If his grade tanked before Summer Vacation, Harvard could reject him. His lips pressed into a single line, hard with the quick retort lingering on his tongue. He growled under his breath, teeth clenched.

Katara lashed out this time, "You," she snapped angrily, "are a _bitch_!" she found herself thinking of the Stephen King book, 'Rage', in which a high school kid took his school hostage and gunned down his peers and teachers for years of ridicule and petty bitching. "You're an elitist, authoritarian moron, and you're just pissed because your job got given back to the guy you took it from!"

The giggles turned into murmurs of agreement.

"Miss Marina, silence yourself, you … you …"

Katara got to her feet and pointed in Donovan's direction, fury on her face. "We don't have to listen to you anymore!" she called out triumphantly.

"Yeah!" Someone yelled from the back of the class, leaping to their feet. "This is our school, not hers!" the kid cried to the others.

There was an outburst of indignant agreement, and several other kids got up, yelling something on the same wavelength.

Ms. Donovan smacked a hand down on the desk, sending shudders through it into the floor that reverberated throughout the room. Her face had turned bloody red and she stared darkly at Katara, who stood six feet away, the guile and confidence the girl had put together to stand up to her rapidly depleting. She'd silenced the class with the thump on the desk. The boy who'd gotten up at the back of the class slowly sank back down, having gone pale.

"Katara Marina," Donovan growled, her eyes dark and her deeply wrinkled face creasing to a terrible scowl as she stared the Marina girl down, "Be seated or I'll have you spending the rest of the day in sanction with the rest of the unruly deviants in this hellhole of a school," she clapped her hand down on the pile of books again and grabbed one off the top.

That was a threat Katara knew was plausible.

Katara lowered herself to her seat, her gaze caught somewhere between defeat and resentment. She put her elbow on the desk and then propped her head on her hand, her blue eyes darting from the teacher to the floor, trying her best to shrug Donovan off. She shouldn't really have left that go … she ordinarily would said 'sure, go ahead, I don't care about getting sanctioned', but today she wanted to see the drama committee's portrayal of 'Needful Things', and she had to fix whatever was going on with Sokka.

Zuko bumped her with a split knuckle. She looked up, her chin still resting on her palm. He shot her an assuring smile and a nod, telling her to hang in there; to let Donovan get away with it this time. They were never going to have to deal with the woman again, so she just had to sit through this lesson, and after that, they were home free. Katara smiled, catching onto what he meant with his gaze.

* * *

><p>Zuko caught Sokka by the shoulder once the class let out. He sucked the Marina boy around a corner and pulled him down into that fabled stairwell G. Sokka glared at Zuko, his blue eyes pouring in like icy water to a sunken ship. Zuko made sure nobody was around, and the fact that everyone was terrified of the stairwell was, for once, a good thing. Zuko released his iron grip on Sokka's sleeve and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets.<p>

Before Zuko has time to speak, Sokka sighed out his own words. "You knew?" he asked, resigned.

Zuko nodded thoughtfully. "Katara told me. Nobody else knows, besides me and you and your sister," he assured Sokka calmly. "You okay?"

Sokka shook his head and stepped back until his back was against the wall. "No," he breathed, lifting a hand and scratching at his head where the hair was pulled back into a short tribal wolf tail. "I'm terrified," he added with a long, exhausted blink. After a moment, he looked up to Zuko and licked his lower lip. "Shit, Zuko, I got a _kid _on the way."

Zuko pushed his brows up as best he could with the scar on his left eye. "Yeah," he noted pensively.

Sokka shook his head one more time, tilting it back to look at the high ceiling of the stairwell. "Why didn't she tell me?" he murmured, obviously hurt by this little point.

"Because you'd have freaked out. Like you're freaking out now," Zuko explained poignantly, one corner of his mouth tilted up before dropping again. "Plus … from what Katara told me, she thought she could handle it on her own. She didn't want to screw up your life too," he sighed, tightening a fist in his pocket and feeling his split knuckles burning.

"Or maybe she just thought I'd be a bad father," Sokka slid down the wall until he was sat on the floor, and put his head in his hands. "Agh, fuck … this is so fucking backwards …" Sokka looked up and frowned at Zuko, "Is this what it was like when Lydia tried to-,"

Zuko negated this immediately. "It wasn't anything like this. For starters, it was a lot less complicated because I already knew how I felt about Lydia. I knew I didn't love her. But you and Suki …" he trailed off awkwardly, apparently not very good at pep talks or reasonable explanations. He didn't really do the whole feelings-talk with Sokka. Katara, sure, and he'd even talked about things like this with Aang, but Sokka … they were men. Men didn't discuss feelings.

"I love Suki," Sokka breathed, seeming to realize this the moment he said it. "I really, _really _love Suki. But this is huge; this changes everything. Is it selfish for me to still want to go to college?" he queried aloud, his fingers pressing at his temples and his brows squeezed together.

Zuko sighed heavily, breath escaping as though he had been holding it. "I don't know, Sokka. I can help but think you two could make it work. Suki wasn't planning on going to college anyway, so … she could go to New York with you in September, I guess," Zuko suggested carefully, not wanting to stress Sokka any more.

Sokka nodded, pondering this. "My dad's going to kill me," he groaned, throwing his face back into his hands. "Shit - _Suki's_ dad is gonna kill me," he corrected himself, his tone not even bordering on humor.

Zuko paused for a short while, and then he queried, innocently, "What do _you _want?"

Sokka seemed to take a brief hesitation, and he thought about this for a moment. "I … want what's best for Suki and the baby."

Zuko smiled at this. "Then that's all there is."

"It is?"

"Why not? You love Suki, Suki loves you, and you both love the kid; who says it has to be any more complicated than that?"

Sokka gave a brief laugh and his shoulders drooped as if his tension was beginning to fade. "Hey, Zuko - you ever considered being a shrink?"

Zuko rolled his eyes. "No thanks. I'm going to law school. Harvard."

"Me too. Yale. I gotta carry on the family business, y'know," Sokka murmured, tugging himself back to his feet and clapping Zuko on the arm. "Thanks man. I needed that."

Zuko shrugged earnestly.

* * *

><p>Aang couldn't hear anything over the chanting in his own head as he collapsed against the examination table in the nurse's office. He clutched at his arm, trying his best to look up at the nurse, who held an empty needle in her hand, towering over him where he struggled to get up. He couldn't believe it - how long had they known he was here? The nurse had worked here before Aang had even come to this school!<p>

And she was a sleeper agent.

What had she injected him with? He felt his chest heaving; his lungs filling with so much air he thought they might burst. "What did you-," he groaned, unable to hear his own voice over those of past avatars, "Argh!" he grunted, his fingers gripping the examination table so hard he thought his fingernails would come free of his fingertips.

"… Destiny … world … -atar is the … between worlds … must … your fate …" Aang heard the nurse speaking beyond the chanting in his head.

Aang heard himself roar, squeezing his eyes shut, and gripping the side of his head with one hand. He staggered to his feet and forced his eyes open to glare at the woman with the empty needle in her hand. Her eyes widened as he grabbed for her, before she dodged and grabbed the handle of the door. Another groping groan escaped the young Avatar as he reached out to catch her. Blinding light filled his vision and he couldn't see, but beyond it, he heard the door hitting the wall, having been swung open.

He had to catch her. He had to find out what she knew. What _they _knew.

Aang blindly found the doorway and began running down the empty corridor, unable to see. Slowly, the light faded away and he was able to see in time to round a corner after Samantha Donohue; school nurse and sleeper agent for the Ancient Society of the Dai Li. She raced up a stairwell and Aang darted after her, emerging out in a hall and catching her image out of the corner of his eye. He reached out, subconsciously trying to grab her - why, he had no clue, but the body did strange things in adrenaline.

Aang had airbent at her.

"Oof!" Donohue exclaimed, having been thrown into the wall at the end of the hall.

Aang stared for a moment as the woman fell to the floor up ahead, unconscious. He knew what she'd injected him with - she'd shot him with the activation serum. The Dai Li had sent her to activate him when they told her to. He had tried running, and they'd gotten to his destination before _he _had. He'd tried hiding, but they'd found him. Now what? Where did he go now?

Something hit the floor behind Aang and he turned on a dime to see Toph, cutting class, her books on the floor in front of her, her hands held up to protect herself. She stared with wide, pale green eyes, disbelieving of what she had just seen. She was obviously trying to find something to say, but Aang was caught like a deer in headlights, between explaining to Toph and catching the sleeper agent.

This was a sign of things to come. Like smoke through a keyhole.

* * *

><p>"This is going to suck," Zuko whispered to Katara as they slipped into their seats in the dimming lights of the drama hall. The room was packed - it was mandatory for all the students to see the show. The sophomores and freshmen had already seen it, earlier that morning, so the afternoon showing was left to the juniors and seniors. Zuko was glad for this; he hated the younger kids in this school. They were all so gullible.<p>

Katara rolled her eyes as Toph and Aang slid in next to them, "Don't be so negative, Zuko - at least they let us buy snacks," she pointed out, extending her packet of kandy-korn toward him. He took some and tossed them into his mouth, effectively stifled for the time being. She turned to Aang and Toph and saw Aang leaning forward to talk to Lydia, in the next row. She ignored this and discreetly slipped her hand into Zuko's.

Zuko offered her a goofy little smirk and squeezed her hand.

"… I'll test it as soon as I can, but what is it?" Lydia whispered to Aang under her breath.

Aang shook his head. "I'm not sure. That's what I need you to find out."

Lydia's mouth formed an 'Oh' shape as if she'd realized her own dumb mistake. "Alright. I'll get the results back to you on Monday, if you're not dead by then."

"If anyone wanted me dead and they managed to get me injected with something, I'd be six feet under already."

"Good point."

Further up the row, on the opposite side of Katara, somebody tapped on Suki's shoulder from behind her. Suki turned to look behind her, and saw Sokka smiling ruefully. She turned back to the front, trying to ignore him. "Suki. Suki, talk to me," he reached with his hand and tucked some of her hair behind her ear.

"We have nothing to talk about, Sokka," Suki smacked him on the hand, forcing him to take it back.

Sokka groaned under his breath in the dimmed drama hall, putting his hands on Suki's shoulders and pressing his thumbs into her back, working at her muscle knots. Hopefully she'd be easier to talk to if he gave her a backrub. Sokka wasn't exactly the subtlest of people, but he knew Suki. She gave a little grumble of indecision. "Will you _please _talk to me?" he asked quietly, careful to avoid funny looks.

Suki answered on a single, annoyed breath. "What do you want to talk about?" she hissed.

Sokka scooted toward the front of his seat and put his head between Suki's and Katara's seats, whispering so nobody else could hear them. "The baby," he continued his working at her tense back muscles, trying to get her to open up to him. "I'm sorry I freaked out last night," he sighed apologetically, "I should've stayed."

Suki said nothing, waiting for him to say something more meaningful.

"Come with me. To New York - when I go to college," he suggested on a breath.

Suki turned her head only slightly, her expression telling him she was mulling this over, but that she wasn't completely won over. Her lips parted and she ran her tongue along her lower lip, wanting to say something, but getting cut off when Sokka continued, his thumbs having stopped working at her muscles in the hazy chatter of kids talking around them.

"I'll dip into my trust fund - you name what you want, and you'll have it. And I'll do the same for the baby. Please, Suki, just give me a chance," he pleaded, his brows tilted up in a way that let Suki see the resemblance between him and Katara, who was ignoring them in her seat. He searched her blue-green eyes, and swallowed hard, wondering what she was thinking.

Suki drew in a breath and then took a long blink. This was a lot to consider - she had her family (or what was left of it), and her own wants to think of. She'd never really left Dahlia Coast before. Once she'd gone to San Francisco on a fieldtrip, but beyond that, she'd never left home. Moving to New York until Sokka finished college? It was a big thing to think about doing. Suki didn't know if she could handle a big city like that - if she wanted to raise her baby away from her family, and her home.

"I … I don't know, Sokka … I grew up here," she murmured, turning in her seat and pecking him on the cheek mildly, unable to say much more than that.

Sokka nodded, a disappointed look on his face, also unable to say much more.

"Sshh!" Katara shushed them all as the curtain went up on the stage at the front of the room.

Elsewhere, an Irishman sat in a plush chair at the front of the drama hall, forced to watch their drama committee wreck a good movie for a second time that day. Declan O'Leary drew a flask from his jacket and took a sip of Jack Daniels. He wasn't a particularly heavy drinker, but he had to do something to take his mind off this crappy thing. He couldn't wait to get teaching his class again on Monday - that fat old bitch they'd had teaching it before looked a couple eggs short of a basket.

Honestly - she looked older than his mother before she'd died, lord bless her soul. Mr. O'Leary slipped his flask back into the fold of his jacket, and raised a hand to push back some fiery red hair and adjusting his glasses so he could watch a horrible performance of a Stephen King classic. He'd have to wean his class back onto good reading material - God, that woman had probably had them on Shakespeare, hadn't she? Lordy.

Oh well, Declan O'Leary leant back in his chair - he was slowly and surely dying of cancer - he'd teach until the day he died. At the very least it would give the class something interesting to talk about.

* * *

><p>When Zuko got home, his mother was chatting with Lu Ten and Iroh in the parlor. That meant Ozai was probably out of the house - or out of the state. Zuko dumped his bag in the ballroom and walked into the parlor, stopping in the doorway when he saw the good half of his family sitting on sofas and drinking herbal tea. They'd even made a cup for him. Zuko sat down beside his mother and smiled at them all in turn.<p>

"Oh, good, Zuko - you're here. We were just talking about you," Ursa patted her son on the arm.

Zuko pushed his brow upward, taking a sip of chamomile tea. "You mean you were talking about the Blue Spirit," he assumed calmly, eyeing his cousin, and then turning his golden gaze to his uncle, who was drinking his tea without even a hint of unease in his demeanor. This was going to turn into a conversation about Alain Baptiste - wasn't it?

Lu Ten cleared his throat nervously, "I told them about your friend, but …"

Zuko met each eye in the room with a cold, calm stare. His mother's nerves tensed up with this, and Iroh seemed only to want to hear his nephew's explanation. "It wasn't a decision. If there had been another way, I'd have taken it. They threatened to send Toph back in a body bag," he grimaced - Toph's father would've _let _them send her back in a body bag. His own father was a monster with too much anger - hers was a monster with no emotion at all. "I did what I had to do."

Ursa opened her mouth to protest, but Iroh spoke instead, "Calm yourself, Ursa. Zuko was well aware of the risks when he took up with the mask of the Blue Spirit. A man who will fight for his loved ones is hard to come by nowadays. I'm not saying you should be proud - but that he needs no more scolding than that of his own mind."

Zuko had no idea what his uncle was talking about, but his mother shut up, and he was grateful for that. He loved his mother, and it hurt that she was so unnerved by the choice he'd had to make, but he really didn't' want to talk about that anymore. He sighed heavily and pulled his school bag off his shoulder, dropping it on the floor and unzipping it. He drew out the book his father had given him, and put it down on the coffee table.

"Ozai gave me this. Yesterday. I thought you might know why." Zuko glanced to his mother, who still looked troubled.

Her troubled expression softened momentarily. "I honestly couldn't tell you, but I suggest you read it."

Something about the way she said it made Zuko wonder what was going on between his parents.

* * *

><p>Aidan Riker waited on Milton Avenue - sometimes watching Zuko's house, sometimes watching the one he'd woken up in that morning. Waiting for what? A moment. A good strategist always knows there is a moment, and he always knows when it is. He waited for his moment. His moment would come to him. That morning had initially left him stunned, and after that came the fury that raced in his veins as of yet.<p>

Nobody wrote him off. He was a threat to everything and only a fool would think or convey otherwise. That girl - that blonde girl he'd fucked last night was going to pay. And whether his moment came from Zuko's house or hers, it didn't matter. His moment was coming. His moment was on its way. Everything would be revealed to him now.

Only his worthless and insignificant father had written him off like that and it had been his demise. Well, that and a knife through the forehead. Aidan would never be underestimated every again. Not by his father, not by Zuko - and certainly not by some uppity English bitch.

His moment was coming.

He didn't give a flying fuck about the Marina girl anymore. Her time would come under her own hand - he could tell that. She was a gullible fool and his talents were wasted on her. Lydia Roberts. That was the girl's name - the one who'd played with him like a cat with a mouse that morning, and she was going to regret the moment she strolled up to him in a nightclub. She would die under his hand. Tonight if need be.

And then the moment came, in the form of a man with graying black hair in a suit, storming out the Roberts girl's front gate with keys in hand, fuming. Aidan watched the man unlock his car and tug open the door, muttering to himself about some woman whoring around with some American bastard. It didn't take much logic to place him as the blonde girl's father. Aidan smirked and cleared his throat.

The man jumped and looked up.

"Who are you?" he took a step back, obviously thinking he was about to be mugged.

Aidan grinned. "I'm a guy looking to make a trade."

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Everything's moving so damned fast! Last chapter, things were going too slow, and now … phoo! Okay, well, I've given this away - Dominic Roberts is in fact, Aidan's puppet. Lydia was somewhat involved, but I like her too much to make her susceptible to Aidan's charm. She's going to be a major player in the coming finale. Also, things are going to get a little more serious with Zuko and Katara.**

**Aidan's not reacting well to Lydia not really caring about him. I don't tend to pick apart my logic for the readers, but I know for fact that Aidan's psychosis is based around his own arrogance and need to be significant. He wants to effect the world so badly that he'd rather destroy it than leave his name to be forgotten. He doesn't want to live in a world that doesn't know who he is. This is because of the way his father pushed him off as nothing more than a punching bag.**

**He wants to mean something. A little love could have done a lot for him a few years before this, but now he's too far gone for saving.**

**Also, the summary I gave last chapter was put down before I started writing this chapter and it just screwed me over. So I leaned away from it a little bit. Shit, I need to lighten up. I used to be too much filler, not enough substance, and now I've gone the other way to make the deadline. My writing got worse about halfway through the chapter, I know that.**

**Got thrown off my horse, though, and as a result my ass is too sore to leave the house. So chapters abounding!**

**REVIEW!**


	20. Future Is Bulletproof

Some people had told Zuko that Rome hadn't burnt in a day, when he said he had to undo a mistake he'd made. His uncle, for the most part, was the one who told him this. When he asked if he meant that Rome wasn't _built _in a day, Iroh just shook his head and told his nephew to allow some things to change over time. Maybe Rome didn't burn in a day, but Zuko had always wondered if it could have.

Anything could go wrong in a short amount of time. A relationship could end on a misunderstanding. A child could die because a car's brakes weren't up to tune. A fire could start because someone forgot to turn the oven off.

"Are you seriously _waiting _for something to go wrong, Zuko?" Katara asked from beside him, her voice a low, hushed whisper in the car on the way to the beach venue for the reception. He still couldn't believe he'd gotten up the guts to ask her to be his date to his cousin's wedding. Luckily they hadn't run into his mother yet, but it would come.

Zuko smiled wanly at Katara, loosening his tie discreetly, "I just have a bad feeling. I'm allowed to have a bad feeling, right?" he glanced to where one of Taylor's sisters was sat on the other side of his date, playing with the bouquet of flowers in her lap.

Katara squeezed his hand and relaxed into the leather seat of the chauffeured car. "Your cousin is getting married today, Zuko. Are you going to miss it because you were busy stressing out?" she smiled at him, her head lolled against the seat behind her. He turned his head and smiled at her thoughtfully.

He supposed she was right; if anything bad happened today, it would probably only be YouTube-worthy, and not a big deal. "I'm glad you're here," he leant toward her and pecked her on the cheek. She caught him by the jaw with a dainty, pampered hand and pressed her lips to his, only for a moment. He wondered how things had gotten to be like this.

At school, they were still just friends; nobody knew what went on between them despite the jokes a few kids liked to make every now and then, and in all honesty, nothing more than soft kisses, hugs and hand holding had happened since that night before they'd killed a columnist. Things weren't serious between them; they were really just friends stealing chaste kisses, for now.

Zuko wasn't sure whether he wanted to get any closer to her, but at the same time, being close to her was so nice.

Waking up with a bad feeling in his stomach every other morning wasn't making it easy to figure his own feelings out. He was grabbing her out of the road every time a car whizzed a little too close for comfort, and every time she asked when they could go into the city and break into her mother's old office to get some patient files, he would tell her they needed to lay low for a while.

"I think maybe you're right," Katara murmured suddenly, sitting a little straighter. "Something's not right."

Zuko grimaced. "Strap in."

Katara smiled briefly and complied, despite being bothered by his constant worrying about her. If she'd worried like this about him, he'd be on edge, irritated and telling her he was totally fine and she should just lighten up. She clicked her seatbelt into the receiving buckle, and was buckled up for a good three minutes before the car stopped outside the reception venue.

Zuko got out first and held the door open for her to step out of the car, and then for Taylor's sister to get out too. When the car pulled away to park with the rest of them, the two stood outside the large mansion-like building, staring for a brief moment. It was like a fairytale palace; with ivy climbing aging, sandy brick walls and white window-frames holding clear glass that reflected gorgeous sunlight across their view.

The scarred boy glanced sideways to Katara, admiring a different view. Her hair was curled and pulled back into an up-style with a few strategically placed hairpins, ringlets of the smallest strands of hair framing her beautiful mocha skin. As always, her blue eyes were the main adornments on her, highlighted by her dangling blue teardrop earrings and matching necklace. She was expensive in every sense of the word.

The dress she'd worn to the ceremony was a deep turquoise blue, with a scoop neckline and short sleeves, all pulled in at the waist with a white sash and an off-center, round sapphire-adorned silver buckle holding it together until the white satin fell down against her skirt, to her knees. The two moved toward the grand staircase up to the building's main door, and Katara held her skirt up to keep it from touching the floor.

As stunning as Katara was, other things were still on Zuko's mind. He really hoped his bad feeling was just nerves about the speech.

* * *

><p>"Do you know what it is?" Lydia stepped closer to her mother, eyeing what the older woman was working on in her hands.<p>

Katherine took off her glasses and put them on the counter, turning her gaze toward the computer, where the results were coming up on screen. "It's a reacting combination - it had to be diluted to be injected into someone, with saline," she stated plainly, "It only affects people with certain genes. I think it might be related to what I've been working on this season."

Lydia pulled a face. "Related how?"

"I'm not sure. I know I can recreate it, but its effects are unknown unless I can test it. Who gave it to you, Lydia?" Katherine turned to face her daughter, "This is serious stuff," she grabbed a piece of paper and began writing something down, quickly and hurriedly.

"I can't tell you," Lydia stepped across the room and looked down at the collection of pictures from her father's travels in the Arctic and Antarctic seas, "Your genome research - the ones with the badger-mole hybrids and the bison creatures - is it connected to father's studies? The submerged city at the North Pole?" she picked up a picture and squinted at it. _'What the-,'_

"Again, I'm not sure, but it's probable," Dr. Roberts moved around the counter into a more equipped part of her laboratory, turning her computer screen so she could read it while working with the chemicals. She put her glasses back on and began putting the components of the serum together in a flask. "I really wish I could test it, but the funding for my research has been completely cut since …"

"Since daddy found out about Richard?" Lydia breathed irritably, "Can he do that?"

"Apparently," Katherine murmured, looking down into the flask, pouring in something bluish.

Lydia reached across her chest and held her opposite elbow, eyeing the flask swirling with the beginnings of that serum. The bald kid that hung around with Zuko wasn't going to die, but if it reacted to specific genes, it could severely hurt the wrong test subject. And if it was reacting to the strange genes her mother was researching (and she was willing to bet it was) the test subject needed blood work done before they could test them.

Lydia drew in a long, thoughtful breath and grabbed the sleeve of her shirt, rolling it up her arm. "Mother, come and take a blood sample from me."

Katherine nearly dropped the flask in her hand. "What? _Why?"_

"Because I'm going to be your test subject."

* * *

><p>Toph looked around uneasily - her problems with red colors were distorting the fairground into a monotonous orange, accompanying decipherable blues. She glanced to Aang, who walked beside her, and then to Suki and Sokka, who were walking ahead holding hands. She cleared her throat to get his attention. He looked at her with clear, gray eyes.<p>

His visual attention wasn't enough for her, and she took his hand in hers, leading him off the main path through the fairground. Aang managed an uneasy smile as they hid in the shadow that a large tent cast upon the grassy plot in the middle of the city. Toph sank to sit on the ground, and Aang did the same, though with confusion on his face.

"What's wrong?" Aang asked, glancing back to be sure nobody could see them.

Toph threw her fist forward and slammed it into Aang's shoulder, causing him to reel back for a moment before he got his balance back, clutching where she'd struck him. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him with eyes narrowed into slits. Aang stared at Toph for a moment, and then sighed in understanding.

"I don't care what kind of superpowers you have. I'm pissed at you." And then she scoffed and blew at her bangs, "I don't even know who you _are!"_

The curve of Aang's brow became an arc of defeat. "I'm sorry for that. But it was for the best that I didn't tell anyone."

Toph's lower lip threatened to tremble. Why couldn't he see it? "I'm not _anyone, _Aang. I'm not your friend - I'm supposed to be the girl you trust with everything. I let you in, and you were my first, and now the person I was _in love with _turned out to be someone I don't even know," her lips tightened against one another, and she blinked at something in her eye.

And that was the most painful thing about it.

Aang felt a lump in his throat. "I _do _trust you, Toph!" he promised desperately, "I was trying to protect you!"

Toph shook her head, closing her eyes. "I don't need protecting. You know that. You were protecting _yourself._"

Aang grabbed Toph's hand and held it to his chest with soft, dry hands. "I'm sorry! I'll tell you everything!" he plead, his gray eyes wanting to search hers, but only falling on closed eyelids.

Toph gently and politely took her hand back and pushed some hair behind her ears as if speaking to a servant. "It's over, Aang," she got her feet up under her and got to her feet. She looked down at him pensively. Things were better this way - how much, she didn't know, but she didn't care either. "We're done," she nodded solemnly, as if repeating this to herself and not specifically to him.

Toph Bei Fong walked home, fell to her bed and buried her face in her pillow, willing herself not to cry. One of Poppy Bei Fong's favorite sayings - oh, and she had many of them - to tell her mid-life-crisis-enduring friends, was 'A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle'. Toph didn't think her mother knew what love was like.

* * *

><p>"I wasn't terrible, was I?" Zuko asked nervously, grateful not to be speaking to the whole room anymore. His speech hadn't gone well, or at least, he didn't think it had. He glanced back in his cousin's direction, and Lu Ten was still laughing at one of the only jokes Zuko had managed to get in. Personally, Zuko didn't really know what was so funny about a tasteless joke about med students having to stick their fingers up-<p>

Katara laughed and cut off his train of thought by slipping a finger into his palm at his side and tenderly tickling the sensitive skin there, causing a shiver to run down his spine. "You were great, Zuko," she insisted calmly, before returning her gaze to the champagne flute in her left hand.

Zuko decided she was right - he was probably just stressed because his father had been looking particularly unimpressed as he sat with Ursa at one of the tables around the room. Ozai probably didn't like weddings in general, even though in the wedding pictures Azula had found when they were little, he'd been particularly elated. Then again, a lot of people who didn't like weddings were probably happy on their own.

Speaking of his parents, the two were moving toward them through the party of people. Ursa's amber jewelry sparkled in the light cast by the setting sun shining through into the venue, and it was obvious Ozai was only coming toward them because of her. He wasn't exactly a 'people person'.

Zuko felt his hand grab Katara's in panic. Oh, shit. He'd never actually introduced a girl to his parents before. This was going to go badly. This had to be what his bad feeling was about. Katara nearly yelped when he grabbed her hand, but she suppressed it and shot him a confused look. He just nudged in the direction his parents were coming from, and his expression found its way onto her face.

Ah … crud.

"Oh, Zuko, darling, there you are!" Ursa exclaimed as soon as she got near enough to speak to him, dragging Ozai by the wrist of his suit jacket. It was rather strange, really; in both the eyes and minds of the two teenagers, to see the monster of so many imaginings and nightmares coming along like a puppy with Ursa. She settled her eyes on Katara and smiled even wider, "My, Zuko, is this your _date?" _she asked sweetly.

Zuko smiled at his mother, gave a respectful nod of the head to his father and nudged Katara with his elbow. "Uh, yeah … Mom, you've already met Katara," he swallowed awkwardly, and then glanced to Katara, "Katara, you know my mother, Ursa … but not my father," and then noticing his pause, he added, "Ozai."

Ozai caught the pause too, but he didn't say anything.

Katara let go of Zuko's hand so she could shake hands with his mother, who she could tell already wanted to push Zuko's unruly mop out of his handsome face. When Ozai extended his hand to shake hands with her as well, she didn't hesitate - it wasn't in her nature. She smiled genially at both and then at Zuko, hoping she was doing okay.

"Nice to meet you!"

They made short conversation for a minute before Ursa tugged Ozai off to congratulate the bride and groom. Zuko sighed as if he'd been holding his breath and then smiled at his date, who was taking a sip of her champagne, looking the picture of a princess to him despite that he knew she'd pull the trigger without hesitation on someone who threatened her life.

Katara blinked at him. "Is something wrong?" she asked curiously.

"No," Zuko shook his head, smiling, "Everything is right."

The Marina girl rolled her eyes at his melodramatics. "Because I made it through meeting your parents? Truly, you have a dizzying intellect," she lowered her head and shook it with her eyelids falling closed on brilliant blue eyes. She opened her eyes and smirked at him tauntingly.

"Don't quote The Princess Bride to me, Katara. I know that book off by heart," he nudged her, this time with his hip, "I bet you only saw the movie."

Katara nudged him back, careful not to spill her champagne, "Is it really so … _inconceivable … _that I could have read the book?"

Zuko pulled an impish expression. "We are men of action; lies do not become us," he then added, "I never actually read the book."

"Me either," Katara grinned, and then she turned her gaze back to her drink in its glass, "Do you know, I once had a dream where you were talking like Westley? You sound weird with an English accent," she pointed out thoughtfully. "Being all smug and stuff …"

Zuko smirked, "And what did this dashing English version of me do to you?" he pushed his brow up mischievously.

Katara paused to think about this for a moment. "I can't remember," and then she caught the smug, dirty look on his face, "but it's not what you're thinking about!" she jabbed him in the chest with a lone finger and then took a sip of champagne. "Hey, look, it's your uncle!" she exclaimed, and grabbed Zuko's hand to drag him across the room.

* * *

><p>Lydia remembered feeling completely normal after being injected with the serum, for a good two hours. After that, she remembered getting steadily colder until she was so cold she needed to get into the bath so badly that she got in fully clothed, and was having the housemaid, Poquita, boil kettle water to keep heating up the bathwater. Katherine looked on, taking notes.<p>

It was all she knew how to do.

Lydia's teeth chattered in her head, and she lay in the water with only her nose above it, trying desperately to keep her body temperature in. It was as if she'd eaten a bucket of ice that had clumped into a snowball that sat in her gut. At first she had just been reading, progressively pulling on more heavy clothes until she was freezing under them. The water was so hot that when Poquita touched it, it burnt her, but Lydia didn't feel hot at all.

At one point, Lydia managed to speak through chattering teeth, "M-mum-mmy …" she sputtered, her lower lip still in the hot water.

Katherine put down her clipboard and knelt beside the bath, steam rising from it, "I'm here, Lydia. Do you want me to call Alistair? I can get your father back here-,"

"T-take th-thiss d-do-down," Lydia scrunched her face up, so cold there were goosebumps on her cheeks, "In th-the-the s-s-symptoms s-section …"

Katherine's brow lifted. "Lydia, I don't care about the science - tell me what you need and I'll-,"

Lydia howled out in despair, able to stop herself from stammering long enough to get her point across. **"_I _****care about the science!" **she gasped out, her voice a dry, frozen choke. "**Take** … **this** … **down**!" she gripped at her soaking clothes in the water, trying to get warm, her voice cracking as she shouted at her mother.

Katherine's face contorted in horror and indecision, before se reluctantly grabbed the clipboard again.

"Ch-chills," Lydia began, shivering, "E-extreme loss o-of b-body temp-t-temperature …" she felt a tiny bit of warmth seeping into her while Poquita poured more water from the kettle into the bathtub. "N-nausea … d-delirium …"

"Delirium?" Katherine asked, worry in her tone.

"Mm-hmm," Lydia squeezed her brow down. "Numb … numbness in lo-lower 'n upper ex-t-tremities," she swallowed hard and gasped in the cold, "Mother-!" she sputtered desperately. Then she grunted low in her stomach and clenched her fists in the water, unknowingly manipulating it to frost between her fingers. The water went cold and she screamed at Poquita to send someone out to buy more kettles.

Katherine took it all down. She stayed all night while Lydia shivered herself to sleep, and they continued to pour kettle water into the bath.

* * *

><p>Aidan dusted off the black powdery substance from his even blacker coat, climbing into the Mercedes of Dominic Roberts. He'd have to remember to thank Slick for his services. Aidan dropped the black hood of his ankle-length duster and grinned at Dominic Roberts, who was sobbing against his steering wheel so hard there were bubbles formed in his nose. For a worldwide exploring archaeologist - or at least that's what the guy said he was - he sure was easy to manipulate.<p>

"I've held up my end of the deal," the teenager leant back in his seat and took a long blink of satisfaction.

Dominic Roberts swallowed hard and wiped his face, his brows coming down. "I killed that man," he told himself shakily.

Aidan pondered this for a moment. "Mmm … no," he negated coolly. "I killed the guy _you _had motive to kill. _You _will be helping me do something I have motive to do. Ever see the movie 'Throw Mama From The Train'? Don't you know how a criss-cross works?"

Dominic wailed in his car, his voice muffled by the engine and the small space. "Just **kill** me now! I want to **die**!" he sniffled like a little girl, "I don't-! Want-! To live-! In a world where-! She doesn't **_love_** me!" he threw his head against the steering wheel again.

Aidan yawned distastefully. "If you want me to, I will. But first, you hold up your end of the deal. Or I'll gouge that woman you're bawling over out of her body with a goddamn, fucking _ice-cream scoop, _once _your_ pathetic life is over," he inspected his short, dark-stained nails, "And as angry as you are … you really don't want that."

Dominic's breath hitched in his throat and his threw himself into a sitting position, putting the car in gear.

_'Average Joes; Gotta love 'em.' _Aidan leant back in his seat and watched the road ahead.

* * *

><p><em>'Our son, Sokka Kuruk Marina was born this morning at 3:17am, healthy and chubby, twenty inches long, nine pounds and four ounces, with eyes the color of the cerulean sea. After seeing his son, Hakoda never wants to leave Dahlia Coast again; this place will always remind him of the first time he met Sokka. I'm sure of it. I'd crack another gay joke about my husband, but I'm too tired.<em>

_'Sokka was a big baby - so big, in fact, I needed an episiotomy to give birth to him. Other than that, there were no complications, except that now I have two stitches between my legs that constantly feel like they're going to come undone. But none of that compares to holding my son in my arms and knowing Hakoda wants to hold him so badly he might steal him away. I'm not jealous. It's strange. I thought I knew love before, but this … **this **__is love.'_

_'Diary! It's been so long since I picked you up! It's been six months since Sokka's birth. He's still only small, and he hates the formulas, but Hakoda and are already talking about trying for another baby. A little brother or sister for Sokka. I hate to stop breastfeeding him now, and it might even be selfish and later cause resentment of a younger sibling if we wean him off the breast-milk so I can get pregnant again, but Hakoda is set on the children not being more than eighteen months apart in age._

_'Oh, my poor vagina. I wonder how many kids the man wants. I'm stopping after two; I have to work, and Sokka takes up so much time already. I should probably tell Hakoda that. As of yet, I think I'll wait until Sokka is nine months old to stop breastfeeding him. I got pregnant the first time after stopping contraception last time; it shouldn't take too long this time.'_

_'I'm leaving it too long between writing in these journals. Sokka is a year old now, and I'm ten weeks pregnant with our second child. Hakoda insists this one will be a girl, though I had thought initially that Sokka would absolutely love having a little brother. He's a papa-wolf kind of boy, just like his father, even though he's only barely on his feet._

_'He's especially papa-wolf toward this little boy at this mommy-and-me group we go to sometimes. Zack, I think the kid's name is. It doesn't matter. Sokka's younger than him by a few months, but he grabs him by the front of the shirt and makes him play with him, since none of the other kids like Sokka all that much. I would tell him to stop picking on the older boy, but he's too young to get what I'm talking about._

_'And this other boy doesn't really mind. He goes along with it and I swear I can almost see him roll his eyes! It's really cute, even though I don't really find other people's kids cute. So Sokka has a friend, anyway, if that counts. Zack - that must be the kid's name - Zack's mother is thirteen weeks pregnant with **her **__second child too, so we talk a lot._

_'It sucks that I make idle chit-chat with a stranger when I don't talk to my best friend anymore. Kelly's turning out healthy, happy patients, so at least her work isn't suffering.'_

_'It's a girl. It's going to be a girl; I fucking know it. I'm crying all the time. It must be an estrogen thing. I told Hakoda my auntie died, but I don't have any aunts. Sokka is now old enough to ask why I'm crying, and he likes to bring me flowers from outside, along with a shirtfront of mud to go with it. This always cheers me up.'_

_'I feel amazing! I talked to Kelly about my crazy hormones, and it was like we'd talked just yesterday! As it turns out, it wasn't my estrogen level going up and down; it was me having repressed a lot after my father died. I guess I stopped 'fucking shrinking myself' a few years ago, huh?'_

_'My whole body aches. I can't precisely remember everything that's happened in the last couple of hours. Yesterday we rushed into hospital because I went into labor. I was two weeks overdue, and complaining about it, but it wasn't premature or anything. Maybe I should've had an induced labor a week ago, but it's too late to fix that now. I was ten centimeters dilated, and pushing, and nothing was happening._

_'We panicked that the baby was in distress._

_'We had an emergency ultrasound that showed us that our baby girl had somehow managed to swim her umbilical cord into a knot. Each time we'd pushed, we'd been cutting off her oxygen supply by pulling the knot tight. The doctors told us she might have brain damage already. We cried for a while, and then regrouped with the doctors. They rushed me into surgery for a caesarean section._

_'I have a feeling I'm still supposed to be asleep. But I can't sleep now. My baby is out in this hospital somewhere. Maybe dead. I can only sit in the dark and wait. I'm terrified.'_

* * *

><p>It really was too late to be hanging around the circus, but after all day in formal attire and highfalutin celebration, it was nice to just throw on a pair of jeans, some sneakers and a jacket and hang around with the sound of the city echoing around. Plus, everyone they knew from school was either having a girly sleepover or out drinking with the boys at this hour. They could be together and nobody would know.<p>

It was a little cold to hold hands, but Katara and Zuko tucked their hands into their own pockets, their arms linked loosely. The attractions were all still lit up and running, but the people walking through the plot were overtime workers finally out of the office, some with their kids, and some on dates with potential lovers.

"That was a nice wedding," Katara murmured thoughtfully, walking along with Zuko.

Zuko nodded, eyes trained on the lights around them, "Yeah, it was. I don't think I've ever seen Lu Ten that happy before."

Without thinking, Katara replied, "He's in love - what do you expect?" she smiled mildly at the grass, "It's probably the best feeling in the world."

"Yeah," Zuko smirked, glanced at her mischievously, and then taking his hand out of his pocket and put his arm around her waist. "It is," he agreed softly, that smug little rasp in his voice both calming and exciting her. He pulled her close, absentmindedly slipping his thumb into the belt-loop of her jeans.

Katara giggled happily, glad there was nobody around to hide from. "So what ever happened to your 'bad feeling'?" she queried, distracted by being close to him.

Zuko sighed, content with being near Katara. "I guess it was just nerves. I have a really _good _feeling right now."

"Like butterflies," Katara pointed out in a bubbly tone, obviously due to butterflies in her own stomach.

"Yeah," Zuko nodded, "Butterflies," and then he glanced to her, the corners of his mouth tugged up in a half smile.

Katara raised an eyebrow at him. "What?" she poked him in the ribs with a pointy finger, wondering what he found so interesting.

Zuko didn't reply. Instead he just smiled at her, and they continued walking until they came to a spot on the lot where two tents - a maroon red one and a deep blue one - sat beside each other like twins dressed in different colors. The red one had a sign beside it that said 'fortuneteller', and the other had a sign that said 'spells', and it reminded Zuko of some comics he'd read when he was a kid.

The two stood in front of the tents for a moment, before exchanging glances of thought and telepathic conversation. Katara patted the pocket of her hoody to let him know she had her own cash and she moved toward the blue tent with an intrigued expression on her face. Zuko smiled at her disappearing figure before turning toward the red tent and pushing the curtains apart to step into it.

Once the drapes fell shut behind him, he looked around in the dim candlelit tent, for the so-called fortuneteller. He saw a table in the middle of the room with a dark brown ceramic bowl of ashes in the centre of it. Zuko frowned and stepped toward the table and only then was the candlelight sufficient to show him the elderly woman sat behind the table.

"Come to hear your fortune, young man?" Aunt Wu pushed her brows upward with a curious smile.

Zuko froze for a moment before standing straighter and reaching into his pocket for his wallet. "Yeah … I didn't see a price outside-,"

Aunt Wu waved a hand, "It's not that kind of a service. I tell you your fortune, and you pay accordingly. Sit, young man; see the future unfold itself before your very eyes," she gestured to the ashes in the brown bowl on the table, and then motioned him over to the seat across from her.

Eventually Zuko sat down and glanced at the ashes curiously. He wondered what fortunetellers did to decipher a future; some girls in school prone to Wicca and stuff like that said they could read palms to tell of your grizzly death, and look into your eyes and read your soul. Zuko thought all that was bullshit, but he wasn't beyond believing in actual fortunetellers.

The woman sat opposite him was aged with shallow wrinkles and crows feet, twinkling brown eyes and a delicate golden headdress in the shape of a crescent moon. She actually reminded him of his grandmother, rest her soul, though probably a lot warmer. Zuko stared back into the ashes, trying to figure out what had burnt into them.

Aunt Wu shuffled a deck beneath her heavy robes and then revealed the deck to the boy as she drew three cards at random from it. The first one she drew had two words on it in all-capitols, and a picture of a child on a white horse riding under a bright yellow sun. _'THE SUN'._

"The sun," Aunt Wu spoke calmly, "Achievement. Material Happiness. Children. Good health. This hasn't always been the case for you, though. A time ago, I imagine I would've drawn this card the other way around for you, child. Your life once circled arrogance, failure, broken contracts and misjudgment," she looked him in the eye as he seemed to become more susceptible to his fortune.

Zuko drew a breath and stared at the card, listening to the words for a moment.

Aunt Wu drew the next card. It was up-side down, but Zuko could make out two naked people on opposite sides of the card, reaching for one another; a woman and a man, and in between, an angel hovering, as if blessing them. Aunt Wu's expression changed to one that seemed to say 'of course'. Zuko frowned at the words on the card. _'THE LOVERS.'_

"Reversed lovers. Interesting," she blinked thoughtfully. "Deception?"

Zuko's frown deepened to a scowl.

"Yes," she murmured, and then went on, "Deception. A conflict within yourself. Infidelity and romantic disturbances. Indecisiveness, I feel the strongest. There is a woman in your life, isn't there? One that you are unsure whether to pull close or push away."

Zuko nodded in defeat, eyeing the card wanly.

The woman reached across the table and lifted his chin with a fingertip. "Do not despair," she smiled at him, "Lies and conflict can confuse and delay love, but not even death can break its bond. Fate is always held by its subjects, and it can be changed and shaped, like the tides under the moon," she took her hand back and gently lay her finger on the lovers card. "Love needs no blessing, or logic. Love needs only itself to thrive."

Zuko smiled weakly at this philosophy.

Aunt Wu smiled back and drew the next card, rowing the three up on the table before her. Zuko would've expected this card if he had known there was one by its name. Aunt Wu grimaced as she drew it upright. _'THE TOWER.' _Zuko already guessed he knew what this meant, but he would listen to the reading just the same. The picture on this card was of a tall tower in flames, with the two lovers from the previous card, this time clothes, falling gracelessly from it.

"The tower," Aunt Wu blinked for a moment. "Violent change. Disruption. Ruin and disturbance. This card often coincides with another. Death. I feel it strongly. If I were to draw another card, I could tell you which it would be," she clutched her deck of cards in her robe and grimaced at the boy. "The tower is war, and imprisonment. Widespread repercussions."

Zuko's smile had fallen to a deep frown of cryptic understanding. "Death," he repeated pensively.

"But not for you," Aunt Wu spoke knowledgably. "Not for you, child."

"No," Zuko agreed darkly, "not for me."

* * *

><p>Bright blue eyes were half-lidded in the dim candlelight and blue glow. The hag sitting opposite her crooned a sickening lullaby as she enchanted the girl with a swirling orb of blue light in her hand. Katara stared into the glowing orb, entranced by its cool glow, but she didn't reach for it. She wanted the glow in a greedy kind of way she couldn't place in herself.<p>

"It's …" Katara paused dreamily, "beautiful …"

The old witch stopped in her crooning and grinned at the girl. "You want it," she stated with a gritty, insinuating voice.

Katara nodded groggily. "I do … can I hold it?" she swallowed hard.

"Only a woman of the water can hold this, little girl!" the witch cackled, and the glow was gone.

With a gasp, Katara woke from her trance. She shook her head hard. "How did you do that?" she eyed the old woman carefully, blinking in wonder.

The witch stood back and held her hands out at her sides, draped in dark blues and purples, wiry gray hair tangling on her shoulders. Katara stared for a moment before she saw the candlelight flicker in the water bowls at the woman's feet. The water was lapping like waves of the sea. Blue eyes widened in wonder. Slivers came up from the bowls and snaked into the witch's hands.

Katara's breath caught in her throat and she leant forward to stare.

The two whips in the hag's hands melted on wrinkled skin and morphed into thick snaky bands around her wrists. Veins in the woman's skin, popped up. The bands on her wrists rolled back into her hands, this time in twin orbs like the one she'd just held out to Katara, entrancing, except these didn't glow. The witch suddenly jerked as if to slap an invisible foe.

Water smacked across Katara's cheek, sending her sprawling back to the furs and blankets on the floor of the tent. The teenager got back into a sitting position, a hand on her cheek, still enthralled by the water's movements. It hadn't hurt that bad; and she had to see it. She longed to reach out for the water, but she didn't.

"How … _badly_," the witch grunted in a satisfied cackle of a voice, "do you want it?" she laughed in a powdery voice.

Katara just stared into the witch's eyes, wanting.

The twin orbs met as one and hovered between the witch's hands. Still laughing in that chalky, gritty voice, the witch clawed her fingers at the orb and it twisted into a ball of ice. The ice crackled against itself, and then the ball disappeared, replaced by a huge explosion of chalky snow powder. Katara peered through the puff, getting to her feet. When the dusted ice disappeared, Katara saw that the woman had disappeared right along with it.

Then over her shoulder, in a cackling crooning voice, she heard the witch's voice. "Boo!" it chirped.

Katara flinched, jumping away, turning and staring. And then she ran out of the tent.

* * *

><p><em>"Grand lotus Iroh, the rumors are unsettling. Is it true? Are the Dai Li really back?" <em>the familiar voice of Piandao came across the shadows in a husky whisper.

_"Yes," _Iroh rasped solemnly in the darkness, _"The rumors are true. The Dai Li have returned, in search of the Avatar."_

Gasps. Murmurs. Bumi spoke; amused. _"Then the Avatar has returned too."_

More murmurs, louder.

_"Silence," _Jeong Jeong cut them off harshly, _"Grand Lotus; what are we to do?"_

Iroh drew in a long breath and exhaled it, fire flickering on the ends of it. There was silence for a long while, before the grand lotus replied. _"Gather our numbers and prepare for battle. Chaos will erupt, and the entire world will be at war within itself - not only divided by nationality and faith, but by element as well. The Dai Li will claw for power. We must see that they never get it."_

More silence.

Pakku was the next to speak. _"What will happen to the people? Our families?"_

Iroh wanted, at this point to tell them to make their families aware of the truth, and the coming chaos, but then he decided against it. _"Those who are not benders will be safe. The others you must worry for. Waterbenders will be consumed by the cold, and Firebenders will burn in their own raging body temperatures. Earthbenders and Airbenders will struggle to keep their own bending under control. Many will die, be it by hand of fever or lack of discipline."_

Piandao spoke again, this time reserved and thoughtful. _"And when the Dai Li come - will we be strong enough in numbers to defeat them?"_

Iroh, arguably one of the wisest men of his time, found himself without an answer.

* * *

><p>Katara stayed quiet, unsure if there was anyone in the house to catch them out. It was late, really, for her not to be heading home, but Zuko had said there was something he wanted to show her. And then she'd made a pouty face and asked if he could show it to her tomorrow; her father would be getting worried. He told her it would be really quick, and caved.<p>

She checked her eighteen-minutes-fast, aging hand-me-down sports watch to see that it was nearly nine o' clock.

Once Zuko shut his bedroom door behind them, Katara said, quietly, "I didn't see Azula at the wedding," and she lifted a hand to finger the ringlets coming undone in her hair. It was nice to have her hair down after four hours all done up in formals.

Zuko sat on his bed and opened the top drawer of his bedside table, drawing out a piece of paper and slipping it into his sleeve to make sure she hadn't seen it. "She was there. You probably didn't see her because she was hanging around the groomsmen, trying to get laid. She dumped Chan. That guy was a jerk anyway."

Katara smiled thoughtfully. She hadn't placed Zuko as a protective-brother type, because he and Azula didn't spend much time together. Well, really, she hadn't placed him for a lot, when they'd first met; he'd just been an archetypal pain in the ass always chasing after Aang and trying to piss off Sokka. And he hadn't really paid her much attention; that had pissed her off on its own.

Zuko looked up, with a rather giddy expression on his face, and he patted the bed next to him. "Sit down," he told her, suppressing his smile as best he could.

Katara tilted her head curiously and walked toward him, sinking down on the bed beside him and narrowing her eyes suspiciously. If he was planning to kiss her, that was fine - better than fine, actually - but if he'd had a little too much to drink and was going to get all goofy on her (and by goofy she meant handsy; it had happened a few times with Jet), she was out of here.

Zuko reached into one of his sleeves and drew out a folded up piece of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to Katara, his giddy expression having changed to a small smile and a tiny blush - if Katara had been looking, she'd have found it adorkable. She took the piece of paper and glanced suspiciously at him, caught the blush and smiled thoughtfully.

"What is this?" she asked, reading over it.

_'Dahlia Coast First National Bank. Below is the requested copy of check number zero-zero-zero-zero-one-zero-one-two-five-five-seven-…'_

Underneath the writing was a black and white copy of a check for three thousand and five hundred dollars, to a Scott McFarlane, with the word 'deposit' written in the notes column. Katara remembered the name, but couldn't place it at the moment. She looked up to Zuko, who was smiling brightly at her.

Zuko ran his tongue on his lower lip and blew at his shaggy hair. "That," he stated happily, "Is the deposit I made on 'Chief's Star Runner', also known as Tomahawk. I upped the going price by a grand, and Song's dad pretty much jumped at it," he smiled at her, lifting a hand and rubbing the back of his neck.

Katara blinked in shock at him. "You … bought me a horse?" she felt the corner of her mouth tugging upward.

Zuko nodded. "I bought you a horse," he confirmed.

Katara felt her cheeks flashing hot pink as she threw her arms around Zuko's neck, unable to bite back the giddy, childish laughter in her stomach. _Butterflies, _she thought, _there are butterflies in my stomach. _Zuko yelped as she caught him in an unexpected hug, the weight of which threw him backward into his bed. The soft sheets and mattress were forgiving to the impact.

Zuko managed a soft chuckle as she giggled into his shoulder. He imagined this was what little girls were like when they woke up on Christmas day to see a pony in the back yard. He opened his mouth to tell her it was his way of making it up to her for everything, but before he'd gotten the second word out, she had pressed a kiss to his lips.

He knew she'd meant for it to be a light peck, but she'd stopped before pulling away, as if unsure. And then hesitant and unsure, she tilted her head to get another angle on him and parted her lips on his, melting into Zuko's warmth. Zuko initially froze, his brow lifting and his eyes falling shut, before he lifted a hand to her hair, pushing it back and kissing back lovingly.

She whimpered into him, as if beginning to say something and then changing her mind, content with this. Zuko moved his other arm up and put his hand on her waist, pulling her weight onto him and wedging his elbow under him so they were on their sides. There was a moment where they were both on their sides and they parted for a breath, before Zuko got above Katara, one soft hand on where her neck met the curve of her jaw, fingers stretched into her hair, thumb on her soft cheek.

Lips crashed on lips again and some air made its way into the kiss when Katara gasped at the sensation of Zuko's tongue on her lower lip. His hair fell down and tickled her face as the two tangled together, and she reached up to push his hair back with one hand, another hand finding its way to his (unfortunately) clothed muscular chest. Through the fabric, her fingers ran along his flesh, eliciting a tiny blissful breath from Zuko.

Zuko felt a shiver shoot down his spine when she slipped her soft fingers into the unbuttoned collar of his white suit shirt, and her fingernails scraped at his porcelain skin. It didn't hurt - it should've, but it didn't. Instead, it sent an alien wave of pleasure through his body. He gripped the sheets under him, holding his weight on his knees and one hand, struggling not to knot his other hand into her luscious locks.

Katara tilted her head back slightly, exposing her neck to him and breathing hard. "Zuko," she murmured breathlessly, gripping his collar in one hand.

Zuko blinked at her for a moment, confused. If the situation had been broadcast on the web, someone would be commenting 'shit just got serious', because Zuko was staring down at her, arguing with himself and the excitement growing below his beltline. She watched him with half-lidded eyes, soft lips parted, and dragged her hand down from his collar to the first button of his shirt.

She undid the button.

Zuko's eyes widened and he exhaled a long, dragged-out breath. "… Katara …" he swallowed hard, his thumb pushing a strand of hair from her cheek.

Katara shut her eyes in a long blink, then opened them and smiled warmly at him, her brows tilted softly, her eyes - those beautiful, cerulean eyes - fixed on his amber orbs of concern. She slipped her hand into his shirt and flattened it over his heart, the soft and steady beat of it against her palm. It was the most beautiful music she'd ever experienced; that steady beat.

Then with both hands, she took his cheeks and gently pulled him down to kiss her.

Zuko wanted to. Fuck, he'd thought about this a million times over; the random chance of her suddenly wanting the screw him, but … this wasn't right. Loving someone meant giving them what they needed, even if it wasn't what they wanted. This just _wasn't _right. This could've been what his bad feeling had been warning him about.

Katara herself might have been ready for this, but Zuko still didn't know how he felt about her, and until he did, he wasn't about to take _that _from her. He felt his hand on her calf, which had somehow found itself against his thigh, and his fingertip traced the smooth scar of the knife cut from the struggle in the kitchen; from the night Jonathan Prescott had stolen her from her home.

This wasn't the right time - death was coming

_(but not for you)_

and with chaos on the horizon, it wasn't a good idea to make things any more complicated. He wanted to protect her from whatever was coming. He hated to think of her as a fragile damsel in distress, but in this case, caution was the best way forward. He hoped she'd understand.

Zuko turned his head away, his initially surprised and concerned expression moving into resignation. This wasn't the honorable thing to do. "Katara, I can't," he told her soberly. He cared about her - it was undisputed. He could honestly say he loved her, more than he'd ever loved a girl before. It wasn't that he didn't love her. Zuko couldn't do this _because _he loved her.

He rolled off of her and laid on his back, shutting his eyes and exhaling heavily, lifting a hand to cover his eyes, lost in thought. "I'm sorry," he breathed out pensively.

Katara stared up at the ceiling too, trying to understand. Was this because of Alain Baptiste? Or was it because of Jonathan Prescott? Katara shut her eyes and breathed out in the same heavy way as Zuko had. It had been a dumb idea anyway. Maybe he was right; this needed to be something they decided while they _weren't _overcome with … er, lust.

She slowly sat up and pushed her hair back, fixing where the neckline of the loose zip-up hoody had fallen down her shoulder. Glancing to Zuko, Katara smiled weakly. "It's okay," she found her voice, and bit her lip nervously. "This isn't the right time for …" she shook her head, unable to continue.

"Yeah," Zuko rasped from his spot beside her, sitting up and putting his elbows on his knees, hunching over and staring at the floor. Then he sat a little straighter, his face still bright red, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, "It really isn't you, I swear, and I really do want to … y'know … but, uh, your dad is expecting you home soon, and I don't have a condom-,"

"Stop, Zuko," Katara laughed, her voice somewhere between anxiety and humor, "I get it. You don't want me to do something I might regret. I'm glad we stopped," she thought aloud, her own nerves finding her way into her voice. She pulled a face. "This is really awkward," she pointed out, putting a cool hand to the blush on her cheeks.

Zuko laughed nervously, "No kidding. Uh … you … need a ride home?" he swallowed hard.

Katara shook her head and stood up. "I think I'll be okay. The walk will do me some good. I need to clear my head."

"You sure? It's getting late."

Katara nodded. "I'm sure. Uh …" she glanced at her crappy old watch and smiled wanly. "Night, Zuko; I'll let myself out."

"Goodnight, Katara," Zuko replied, his red face fading into a deep pink.

Katara walked out of the room, and then practically ran down the stairs. As soon as she was out the front door and out in the cool night air, she lifted a hand to the side of her face, her eyes widening in horror and her mouth twisting into a anxious frown. She power-walked out the main gate and continued to walk, unable to believe herself. He probably thought she was the biggest slut in the history of the world.

_'My **god**__, I just **threw **__myself at him!' _she pulled up her hood and berated herself the entire walk home.

* * *

><p>"Well, well, well," Aidan tapped the large flask, holding it up in the darkened laboratory. "This certainly looks important," he glanced around at all the broken vials and flasks on the floor, some of them reacting with others and fizzing and foaming. But the one he held up - a dark teal serum - had a label on it that said 'highly concentrated' and a few other terms he was unfamiliar with.<p>

Why, this looked very important - it was contained in an air-tight container he'd found in a refrigerator, so it probably reacted with oxygen or carbon dioxide, or it got airborne and was dangerous to human beings. That sounded like a lot of fun. Maybe he could open it in a crowded place and kill a whole load of people. Maybe it was a neurotoxin. Ooh, that sounded like fun!

One of the terms on the label was 'dilate with 95% saline before injection', and it didn't take much logic to figure out just what that meant. Aidan slipped the flask into his backpack, between the masses of paper towels and cotton balls he'd found around the now-destroyed laboratory to keep it from getting smashed apart. He wanted to kill people, but er, not himself.

That would be pretty fucking stupid.

He wondered what kind of bomb Daniel would be able to put together with a highly concentrated neurotoxin.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Part One of the Two-Part LILAM Season Finale. **

**_"Deepest regrets_**

**_I can tell you no more_**

**_For death is knocking at the door._**

**_Sincere apologies_**

**_Nothing can be done_**

**_But to fight, but to die, but to run."_**

**Review!**


	21. Aftermath Is Secondary

"Dad, what's two times six?" Aidan asked, his face screwed up as he eyed his homework thoughtfully, knees on the floor and elbows on the coffee table in the dingy light of their living room.

Aidan's father sat sprawled in his throne - his armchair - watching the television intently with a bottle of Jack Daniels dangling from one hand.

"Dad?" Aidan repeated, bright gray-green eyes youthful and innocent, looking up to his father.

Elmer David Riker grumbled in his seat. "Shuddup, brat. I'm tryin'a watch TV."

Aidan's brows tilted for a moment before he looked back to his homework and frowned wanly. "But I'm stuck on this-,"

Elmer's foot kicked out, catching under the coffee table and throwing it upside down, through the air, the wood smacking the kid in the face and throwing a pencil case to the puke-green carpet of their shabby apartment. The five-year-old jumped back, a hand on his cheek; looking up to his father, hurt both physically and emotionally.

"Shut'cher trap, y'fuckin' id-jit," Elmer scolded harshly, not even affording his son a glance, "ain't my fuckin' problem if y'can't figure out yer fuckin' homework."

"Aidan. Aidan, wake up."

"Huh?" Aidan grumbled groggily, blinking his eyes open at a voice that reminded him of his mother's. He scowled as soon as he saw … aw, jeez, what was her name again? Either way, it wasn't his mother. He threw an arm in the girl's direction, shoving her away. "Fuck, bitch; I told you never to wake me up!" he yelled at her, barely awake and throwing himself into a sitting position on the lumpy mattress on the floor.

Jenny swallowed hard and blinked at him for a moment. "Sorry," she murmured in a tiny voice.

Sometimes Aidan got tiny moments where he saw himself turning into his father. This wasn't one of them. "What the fuck, then? Where's the fucking fire?" he snapped angrily.

Someone cleared a throat from the doorway. "I happen to be the fire," Daniel explained plainly.

Aidan's eyes widened and he leapt to his feet, grabbing a shirt with torn-off sleeves and pulling it on over his torso. He stepped off the mattress and stalked toward Daniel, who was leading him into the main room of the crappy apartment. Bright sunlight shone through the windows, catching Aidan's gray-green eyes like gems. In the middle of the room, on a dining room table they'd bought at a garage sale held by an ex-divorcee, was a mass of electrics and wires and mechanics.

"This is it?" Aidan smirked, impressed.

Daniel nodded, bringing a hand to his lower lip. "I tested some on Slugger; he's out in the hallway. I don't think he's gonna live," he stated in a nonchalant tone of distaste, "If it gets airborne, it'll affect the whole damn state, if not the whole fuckin' country. I got masks," he gestured to the two gas masks on the table, beside the bomb. "Where do you want to blow it off?" he grinned at Aidan.

"Take a guess, Slick," Aidan grinned right back. "Dahlia Coast Public High School. Where else?"

* * *

><p>Katara was grateful for the fact that she hadn't seen Zuko yet today. Each time someone mentioned his name had been followed up with a deep pink blush from her, and that had happened a lot with everyone asking about the wedding she'd gone to the day before. Though, in the back of her mind, she wanted to see him. She needed to talk to him.<p>

She had a bad feeling.

Katara hadn't told anyone about what she'd seen that witch do the night before - she was afraid it was just another apparition. Maybe she had a fucking brain tumor or something nuts like that. Either way, she wasn't about to tell people she'd seen a witch turn water to ice, and ice to dust last night.

She plucked open her locker and the first thing she saw was the picture on the door, of Tomahawk. She smiled thoughtfully and then reached to get her mathematics book, but stopped when she saw a little piece of yellow paper - from a post-it notepad. Someone had put it through the narrow slots of her locker door. She picked out the piece of paper and turned it to read.

_'Meet me in hallway D - Zuko,'_

Katara pulled a face. He had to have put that in her locker on first break, and then expected her to be caught up with other stuff, causing her to get to her locker after everyone else was already in class. And he was right; she'd been in the library with Suki, trying to catch up on her biology coursework. But there was no way he could possibly have known that. Unless he spoke to Sokka. Ah, right.

She involuntarily found herself moving toward the stairwell toward hallway D. When she got out into the hall and looked around, she saw no one, and heard no one. Maybe he'd taken off, bored of waiting for her. Katara walked down the hall, looking around curiously, wondering if he was leant behind a locker row or something. There was a click and a swing and someone grabbed her wrist, sucking her into a darkened classroom.

Katara gasped in surprise, before she realized what was happening and relaxed into Zuko's grip.

"Excuse me, Miss Marina, but do you have a hall pass?" Zuko teased, golden eyes fixed on blue.

Katara shook her head and chuckled warmly. "You nearly gave me a heart attack, Zuko," she pointed out, enjoying his arms wrapped around her.

Zuko smirked thoughtfully, "You know, this is going to sound like a totally random question, but what happens if you get scared half to death twice?" he nuzzled his lips to her temple, his breath warm on her skin and his hands linked at the small of her back, holding her close.

"I think you've been spending too much time with my brother," Katara tilted her head, her eyes falling shut at the sensation of soft pink lips to her skin.

Zuko smiled evenly and squeezed her gently. "I think I haven't been spending enough time with you," he put his forehead to hers, his own eyes falling shut.

"I think I agree," Katara tugged the corners of her mouth up and then tipped her head back, brushing her lips on his briefly. "But …" she paused, pulling back and looking over her shoulder to the door behind them, "we really shouldn't be sneaking around on school property. We're pretty much asking to get figured out right now," she bit her lower lip.

Zuko whined slightly under his breath - probably one of the cutest noises Katara had ever heard - and captured her lips for a few seconds, brow furrowing reluctantly. He opened his mouth then to say something, but stopped. He wanted to stay with her right now; something bad was about to happen, and soon. "Stay here. With me." He murmured softly.

Katara felt his hold on her tighten for a moment and she considered it; staying here with him. She had to get to class, though, and like she'd said, she didn't want their relationship to get past the door to the gossipmongers that high school students were. "I have to go," Katara felt her hand tighten on the fabric of his shirt. Something was wrong; leaving here, she knew, would feel like a goodbye.

Zuko sighed, one hand coming up from the small of her back and slipping to the back of her neck, into the tresses of flowing brown hair. He kissed her again, this time a little more insistently, as if taking a sample to remember her by. Katara's hand found its way up to the back of his head, winding his soft black locks between her fingers. When they parted, Katara put a hand to his cheek and gave him a reassuring smile, before turning for the door.

"Katara," he spoke softly.

She looked back.

Zuko met her eyes seriously. "Be safe," he told her, voice wavering slightly.

Katara's brows tilted. "Zuko …"

"I mean it," he swallowed. "If something happened to you, Katara, I don't know what I'd have left," and then, on a small breath, in a tiny voice, "… I love you."

She stared at him for a moment, her bad feeling returning.

"Just promise me you'll be safe," Zuko's fingers twitched at his sides, as if he were anticipating something.

Katara stepped toward him and took his cheeks, pressing another kiss to his lips; just a short one. "I promise," she nodded, hearing her voice crack.

And then she left.

* * *

><p>"Useless fuckin' brat!" Elmer reached low and grasped the brat by the back of his shirt. The face that stared at him was red-soaked in blood from a cut on its forehead, and puffing in strange places from blows against hard objects. "Yer a fuckin' waste a space!" he shoved the brat across the room.<p>

The brat stumbled on his own twisted ankle and toppled to the floor, the blood on his face mixing with tears. "I'm s-sorry!" he choked a sob, throwing his hands and broken fingers over his head to protect himself. "I-! I'm sor-ry!" he wailed, pain splitting through his arms from the pain of a chipped bone in his wrist and the twisted thing that had once been a pinkie.

Elmer's foot thumped into the seven-year-old boy's ribs, cracking one in the process and bringing the wail to a shout, "Can't do a fuckin' thing right, you pointless li'l shit!" he kicked again, this time catching his son in the elbow and sending stabs of agony through broken fingers and bruise muscles.

Aidan heard himself crying for his mother, as he always did, but his mother never came. He'd always dream that one day his mother would save him from it, but she never did. She was in the next room with a customer, getting twenty dollars an hour by selling her own body. One day she would run away and leave him with the monster, and he would still wail in his head for her to come back and save him.

"Go ahead - fuckin' cry, y'piss-poor excuse of a boy! Nob'dy's comin' for ya! Go 'head, fuckin' cry!" he grabbed low and caught the kid by his shirtfront this time, breathing out the smell of whiskey and vodka. He slammed the brat against the wall and then crushed the boy's face between the drywall and his fist.

The only thing that ever saved Aidan from his father was unconsciousness.

* * *

><p>Aidan looked to Daniel, who was making sure his handgun was invisible under his jacket, as the two strolled through the halls. Slick was looking around curiously, not having been to school since he was twelve. He'd gotten expelled a long, long time ago. He was silent, sometimes tearing certain things off walls like artwork and notices.<p>

"This place is a shithole," Daniel murmured quietly.

Aidan nodded agreeably, but said nothing, just keeping one hand on the strap of his rucksack and his mind on the Glock tucked into the back of his trousers, hidden by his long duster. The two made their way to the reception room, where the school secretary was sitting at her desk, typing up some newsletters for the drama club. She looked up at the boys and blinked for a moment.

"Aren't you supposed to be in class?" she then raised an eyebrow behind her glasses.

Aidan smirked and Daniel drew a gun from the holster under his arm. "Nah," Aidan answered calmly, even as she stared, wide-eyed at the gun Daniel pointed in her face. "Would you be a doll and call the juniors and seniors to the drama hall, and the freshmen and sophomores to the assembly hall?" he smiled sickly-sweetly as Daniel gestured silently to the PA on her desk.

She stared for a moment longer, before she grabbed up the microphone on the desk, her voice faltering.

**_"W-would all juniors and seniors, and their homeroom teachers, assemble in the drama hall, please - and would all freshmen and sophomores, and the homeroom teachers, assemble in the assembly hall? Thank you."_**

Then she put down the microphone and eyed Aidan, lifting her hands above her head in surrender. "I-I've done what you asked. Please let me go, I have a family, please-,"

Daniel pulled the trigger and shot her through the neck. She gargled for a moment on her own blood before collapsing to the floor behind the desk.

Aidan raised an eyebrow at his friend, the ghost of a smirk on his face.

"What? She was babbling. You know I hate it when people babble," Daniel stared right back, the gun smoking in his hand.

Aidan rolled his eyes. "I thought we said the first kill was gonna be mine," he glanced out the door and down the hall, where kids were starting to pile out of their classrooms. He swatted Daniel's hand and moved out into the hall, his hand on his rucksack, being sure it was still there; he had to protect the goods.

"You get the blow off the bomb, and I'm stuck with snot-nosed kids. I figure we're even," Daniel stuck his gun back into his jacket.

Aidan glared at Daniel. He'd blow his brains out now if he could do this on his own. "Fine," he answered diplomatically, before turning away and moving down the hall. "Close that door," he called over his shoulder, "we wouldn't want anyone happening upon her," he reminded Slick, referring to the receptionist.

Daniel complied, shutting the door and twisting off the lock, before he moved silently into the hall where the sophomores and freshmen were piling in. Aidan caught sight of Daniel pulling up his gas mask, probably because he wouldn't be able to tell when Aidan let off the bomb. Aidan smirked and followed the seniors and juniors into the drama hall. Kids were standing around because seats hadn't been set up, chatting and murmuring their confusion.

Teachers conversed just the same, not having been made aware of an assembly today.

Aidan waited until the very last of them had gotten in, and then locked the door, using the butt of his gun to knock off the knob. The only way out now was to shoot it open, and he was the only one with a gun here. A regular guy would've gotten antsy by now, but Aidan wasn't regular. Aidan was a top-quality killing machine. It was his prime function. He pushed through the crowd, grabbing a plastic chair from the sidelines of the room as he went, making his way to the front of the room.

He first put the chair up and then hopped onto the stage at the front of the room. Most of them looked when they saw somebody taking the stage, but to get the rest of their attention, he pulled the gun from the back of his pants and fired a shot up at the ceiling. The panic began with loud screams and yelling. Aidan fired another shot to get them to shut up, a grin spreading on his face.

_"Good Morning Dahlia Coast!"_ he exclaimed in a sickeningly nonchalant tone, _"It's seventy degrees with a cloudless sky, but it looks like mass panic and a chance of death later on towards lunch time, however this can all be avoided by keeping your trap shut and doing just was the guy with the gun says!"_ he grinned at the crowd as they stepped back from the stage.

People were trying the door, but it wasn't budging. Aidan could see Zuko in the crowd, with his friends around him, the boy with the scar staring at him from the masses with wide eyes. Aidan made a dramatic bow in his ex-best-friend's direction, before standing straight and pulling his rucksack from his shoulder. He put his bag on the chair at his side, unzipping it and pushing it down to reveal a large hunk of wires and mechanics.

"**Oh my god he's got a bomb!**" one girl screamed from the front of the room.

More screams erupted, and Aidan didn't bother to fire any more shots; bullets were expensive, you know. Instead he breathed in the panic, the chaos … the anarchy. Then he addressed the crowd like a trickster in a circus show. _"Nobody try to be a hero,"_ he called over the noise, crossing his arms over his chest, effectively silencing the panic, "You all have until the lunchtime bell goes off, and then this baby goes off, releasing a neurotoxin that will kill every single one of you," Aidan's face was curled in a sick grin, "Don't like it, I can blow your brains out instead."

A jock, wailing like a four-year-old, pushed to the front and plead out desperately, "Pl-please d-don't-," he sniffled pitifully, "L-let me go, I don't w-wanna …"

Aidan's brows went up but his eyes betrayed no surprise. He yawned and raised the gun to the boy, pulling the trigger and shooting him through the hip. He would die anyway, but he could suffer a little until that happened. The jock collapsed, screaming in pain, clutching his hip in both hands, blood staining his clothes, his skin and the floor around him. His friends, who helped him shove freshmen into dumpsters, and laughed when he gave wedgies to nerds, just stepped back like all the others, like a herd culling away a diseased animal. His screamed faded into moans, whimpers, and then silence.

"Enough!" Zuko bellowed from the middle of the room, loud enough that people moved away from him in a circle, including his own friends. He was grateful for this; he didn't want his people around him, in case Aidan wanted to get a shot at him. "Aidan, stop this!" he shouted across the silenced hall. The crowd prepared for another bullet to be fired.

Aidan smirked at Zuko from his high spot. "What are you going to do, Zuko? You want to come up here and take the gun from me? Be my guest."

Zuko stayed where he was, golden eyes fixed on Aidan in a hard stare.

The boy with the gun clucked his tongue condescendingly. "That's how it is with you, isn't it, Zuko? You're all talk, no action," Aidan's eyes narrowed at the Scorsese. "You know, we could've been great, you and I. You could've made this a whole lot more fun. Because you weren't always like this, you see. I remember a time when you would beat a man half to death for saying something you didn't like. Ah, those were the days," Aidan sneered tauntingly.

Zuko stood where he was, staring, trying his best not to show fear, and said nothing.

Aidan gestured to a tawny-haired girl in the front row. "Hey. You with the pigtails," he snapped dryly. "Collect cell phones. If I count one cell phone less than the number of kids here, I'll slash your throat open," he made a threatening slash across his throat with his fingers. The girl stumbled on her own feet and pulled off her backpack, emptying her things onto the floor and going around collecting phones in it.

Aidan stood squarely, arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed, mouth shaped in a thoughtful smirk.

* * *

><p>Eight minutes earlier.<p>

**_"Would all juniors and seniors, and their homeroom teachers, assemble in the drama hall, please-,"_**

Zuko didn't hear the rest, because he was too busy being thankful to get out of his Chemistry class. There were a number of things wrong with intermediate Chemistry, but the worst by far was the girl who sat next to him, doodling little hearts with initials in them (it didn't take much logic to piece together what she meant when she put down 'BMxZS'), and shooting him toothy grins every once in a while.

Zuko tugged his rucksack onto one shoulder and followed the crowds of kids out of the room, but stopped for a moment to check his phone for messages. None. Zip, zilch, nada. There was nothing to tell him something was about to go terribly wrong, but he still knew, in the back of his mind. It was the reason for his stormy mood.

"What's going on?" Sokka came up behind Zuko and clapped a hand on the taller boy's leather-clad shoulder. "I didn't know there was an assembly today."

Zuko shrugged halfheartedly. "Probably some news about the football games, or something."

Sokka's face screwed up in annoyance. "Ah, shit, they're not canceling them, are they? We get to kick some San Diego ass next Monday!" he pouted.

Zuko wondered if Sokka would be as calm if he knew he was sneaking around with his sister. He found a smirk getting on his face; there certainly was a kind of allure to a clandestine relationship behind closed doors, sex or no. "Who knows?" Zuko answered disinterestedly, looking forward to the double doors that the older kids were swarming through.

Sokka sighed and the two pushed into the drama hall, immediately catching sight of Suki and Toph standing together in the middle of the room. The two joined their friends. When Sokka asked where Aang was, Toph snapped that she didn't know and she didn't care. Zuko exchanged glances with Suki, who confirmed his suspicions with a nod. Aang and Toph had broken up.

Zuko frowned and looked around. "Hey, where's Katara?" he asked curiously.

Despite having looked like she'd cringe at Aang's name, Toph suddenly frowned, looking around for him.

Then an explosion shook the entire room and they all gasped, turning to see someone standing on the stage with a gun held high over their head. At the sight of the gun, they all ducked a little, before they stood and stared. His eyes fell on the gun first, and then its holder. Aidan Riker stood on a pedestal, with a sickening grin on his face. Zuko felt the color drain from his face.

* * *

><p>Ten Minutes Earlier.<p>

"You know, you guys really ain't as bad as people think you are," Katara murmured groggily, before inhaling a hit of the spliff between her soft lips. Then she grinned, sitting on the floor of the mostly-soundproof projection room above the drama hall and lolling her head on her shoulder. "And why don't you just ask her? The worst she can say is 'no'."

Jet stuck his tongue out at his ex-girlfriend. "No _way, _Kitty-kitten; I'm not asking Jin to leave home after what happened to her," he shook his head adamantly, his pot cigarette wiggling in his mouth as he spoke.

Katara rolled her eyes. "Jeez, Jet, don't call me that," she chuckled thoughtfully, "And Jin's a really strong person; from what I can tell, she really loves you and I think she'd like to go to college with you but you just need to ask otherwise she'll think you don't want her to come and then she'll feel rejected and that won't be good at all and-,"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Marina," Smellerbee held up her hands in a t-shape to signal a time-out, "don't babble. I hate when people do that," she extended her reefer to Longshot, who was sat next to her, staring at the ceiling in his pensive, silent way.

Aang raised a lone finger sagely, "Clear speech is a sign of clear mind," he quoted wisely.

"Clear," Katara scoffed, "My mind is totally clear. It's _see-through."_

There was a long pause in the conversation, with Katara just inhaling and exhaling her own smoke, blinking lethargically and grinning like an idiot. Out in the hall, the heard the muffled announcement of an assembly. _"… **All juniors … seniors … home- … teachers assemble … drama hall … sophomores …"**_

They considered getting up, but then decided they were way too high to do that. Besides, they could watch the assembly from up here. If teachers came, they'd be well and truly fucked, but in the meanwhile, they could sit here in the smoke of their own intoxication and grin at their reflections in the glass window overlooking the drama hall. Katara yawned, rubbing at her eyes and smearing her mascara across her eyelids and then grinning at her own mistake.

"So, Kitty-kitten …" Jet smirked at Katara, "anything ever come of that make-out session with Scorsese at The Aristocrat?" he poked his tongue out and did a suggestive eyebrow-dance.

Katara grumbled low in her throat. "Seriously, Jet, stop calling me that; I fucking _hate _that goddamn nickname. And no. Zuko and I are just friends," she insisted calmly.

Jet chuckled. "Whatever you say."

"We are!" Katara swore adamantly.

Jet held his hands up innocently. "I never said you weren't."

"But you were thinking it!" Katara smacked him in the arm. "Why, what do _you _think might've come out of it?"

Jet just grinned dirtily at her. "I thought maybe you might have hooked up and let him put his …" Jet whistled between his teeth, "in your …" he made a squeaky noise with his lips and shot this self-impressed, dirty look in Katara's direction, earning himself another slap in the arm and a bop over the back of the head.

"That's gross," Aang rolled his eyes, lifting a hit to his lips and dragging in a long breath of it.

Jet eyed Aang for a moment. "I'm being specific. If I said 'did you let him fuck you', it could be construed in a number of inaccurate ways."

"I would've gotten the picture, Jet," Katara laughed.

Then the explosion of a gunshot shook the entire school.

* * *

><p>The cell phones were gone. Knives, razors and other potential weapons were also taken from the young hostages. Maybe three or four kids had managed to dial 911 before their phones had been taken; even if emergency services didn't know <em>what <em>was wrong at Dahlia Coast Public High, they knew _something _was wrong. That was a start, at least. They had to keep hope.

Hope was often the only thing you had in times like these.

Some had plead to call their parents, or to speak to that special someone just once before they died, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Others cried for mercy; for him to just let them go because they had families and futures and they'd pay big money for their lives, but their offers were declines. Many fell silent, contemplating their own lives and the imminent end of them. Many of these many began to cry, male and female, student and teacher, young and old, Goth and Cheerleader, Jock and Nerd alike.

They sank slowly to the wood-panel floor, heads in hands, eyes wide in catatonic horror, in small groups of those few friends who really mattered. The panic settled into something worse. A dingy, dark gray storm cloud of suspense. There couldn't have been a worse feeling in the world than waiting for your own demise.

Toph sat silently on the floor in a group with her friends, her eyes downcast and her hands in her lap. She was going to die now, the last thing she'd have told Aang being 'it's over'. True enough, it was. Everything was over and coming to an end now, but she'd give anything for one last second to tell him how much he meant to her. But after all that … she was able to smile solemnly. At least he would live. He wasn't here, and at the gunshots, he'd have run. Aang would live. It somehow began to counteract the doom of death.

Sokka and Suki held one another tightly, both biting back painful tears, each with a hand on the soft, subtle swell of Suki's middle. Suki murmured how she'd have given anything to spend the rest of her life with him, and he replied that he would die to save her and his unborn child. The two clutched tightly, unwilling to let go. They would die holding on. They would never, ever, let go of one another.

Zuko sat hunched up, his face in his palms, his fingers slipped past his hairline; his amber eyes squeezed shut, the faintest trace of a tear on the eyelash of his good eye. He himself was unsure whether he was relieved or horrified; his life was over, and yet it wasn't so bad because Katara was out there, somewhere, alive. This was all his fault. If he'd been more vigilant, and instead of avoiding Aidan, had kept him near, he'd have known this would happen. He'd have been able to save so many lives.

"Zuko!" a voice cracked, bringing him to look up immediately. The voice was barely above a whisper, but in the silence, he heard it like a firework on a silent night.

Zuko gave a groan from his chest as his sister collapsed in front of him to her knees and threw her arms around him. He was caught unawares, but he put his arms around Azula in reciprocation. He held her tight for a short moment before she pulled back and met him with mirrored golden eyes, drier than his, but just as concerned. "It's going to be okay," Zuko heard himself promising his sister, squeezing her hand involuntarily. It came so naturally.

Azula shook her head, her voice a shallow whisper. "You have to be able to do something, Zuzu."

His features hardened in futility. "What?" he snapped dryly, "what could I possibly be able to do, Azula?" he frowned wanly, reaching into his jacket and drawing out a cigarette. He looked for his lighter, but he couldn't find it; hadn't been able to for a while now. He needed a smoke like nobody's business. Zuko had picked a bad month to quit smoking.

Azula's hand reared back and she slapped him. Nobody paid attention, caught up in their own hells. "I won't hear any brother of mine speaking that way!" she hissed darkly. "Figure something out!" she grabbed his shirt, trying to be the picture of collected, cool determination and threat, and failing rather horribly.

Zuko stared into his sister's eyes for a moment and just sighed, hanging his head and shaking it. "Like _what_? There's no way out. We're going to die, Azula."

Sokka snarled from his spot beside Zuko. "What do you suppose we do, captain asshole?" he gripped Suki tighter.

The Scorsese looked back thoughtfully, and then looked away. "Think about our place in the universe?" he suggested hopefully.

* * *

><p>Immediately sobered by the shot, with Jet and the others having fled, Katara and Aang crouched in the projection room, peeking through the large window down into the drama hall, where Zuko had just been silenced by Aidan, unable to say more than he already had. They hadn't been able to hear his words, but they knew Zuko had told Aidan to stop, and that Aidan had refused. Pretty fucking obvious, that.<p>

Katara sank down behind the wall below the window, sitting on the floor and glancing to Aang. "Are you sure that's what that bomb is, Aang?"

Aang sat down next to her. "Yes."

"How sure?" Katara mulled over his story of 'benders' and remembered the woman at the circus the other night.

"Positive," Aang nodded adamantly, brows coming down hard.

Katara exhaled heavily. "If I were anyone else, Aang, you know I wouldn't buy your story of being a thousand years old, right?" she blinked at him, managing a tiny smile amidst the chaos. "I'd think you were out of your mind."

Aang nodded again. "I know," he swallowed, and then he glanced away from her. "We have to stop that bomb from going off; it can affect at least half of the population within a hundred-mile radius, and that's the _best-case _scenario," he grabbed his pocket, drawing out his phone and glancing at it for the time. Lunch hour seemed closer than it ever had before.

The Marina girl grimaced. "What's the worst-case scenario?" she tilted her brows in concern.

There was a pause.

"It could hit the whole world as soon as the canister is opened." Aang's gray eyes fell on blue ones, hardened in a serious stare. "Do you know what that's like? Every other person on the planet being given a kind of power so strong it can take out tens of acres at a time, and not being able to control it? The world is going to fall into chaos if we don't stop that bomb, Katara."

Katara stared at Aang for a moment. "But it's on a timer - how can we stop it?"

"That guy must have a cancellation sequence or something for it. You need to get him to give it up."

"What do you mean 'you'? I thought we were _both _doing this," the girl with the blue eyes fixed a cold stare in her friend's direction, "I don't know the first thing about deactivating a bomb."

Aang shook his head, his fingers drumming anxiously on his thigh as he considered the possible outcomes of this day. "You won't be deactivating a bomb, Katara. You just need to figure out what makes that guy tick. You need to figure him out and get him to tell you how to turn it off."

"What?" Katara yelped, struggling to keep her voice down. "I _just _need to figure out a psychopath who's holding hundreds of kids hostage? What kind of moron are you, Aang?" Katara grimaced and furrowed her brow. "Zuko has a better chance than I do at getting that guy to open up. Zuko knows him. Aidan wouldn't be able to stay detached."

"Neither would Zuko," Aang countered reasonably. "What if Aidan managed to get Zuko to _help _him, Katara?"

Glancing away, the girl with the blue eyes answered the question in her head. It would be her fault. But she didn't know the first thing about Aidan! How was she supposed to figure him out before the bomb went off at lunchtime? All she knew was that he was a crazy psycho, and she didn't really even know the ins and outs of that. She had no idea what fueled his anarchism, or what he stood to gain by blowing up a school full of kids.

"Katara, you have to try," Aang insisted.

Katara glared at her friend. "What about you? Why can't you do it?"

The Avatar smiled wanly at the waterbender he saw in his friend. "I would if I could. But I know you. I know you can do this."

Blue eyes fell shut indecisively, doubting the airbender's wisdom.

* * *

><p><em>"Useless li'l shit!"<em>

_"Stupid fuckin' brat! I'll fuckin' rip yer nads out-,"_

_"Y'fuckin id'jit, a fuckin' retard got more sense than y'do!"_

_"What'de fuck y'think yer fuckin' doin', y'piece-a crap?"_

"Leave me alone," he whispered to himself, "I'm sick of you hitting me. I'm sick of it. I hate it." Thirteen-year-old Aidan Riker stood over where his father was sleeping in his throne, a large knife held high over his head, eyes wide and terrified as he used his free hand to hold a cushion above Elmer's face. He placed the cushion, balancing it on Elmer's nose and brow, the knife shaking in his hand.

The brat swallowed. _'I'm sick of you. I'm sick of you! I hate you!' _he chanted in his head, his face twisting into a contorted, feral, primal grimace, as his hand tightened on the handle of the knife. Aidan slowly brought the knife down, touched the cushion; testing the path of the blade. Then he held it above his head again and pushed his eyes as wide as they could go.

**"I HATE YOU!" **he screamed, putting his entire weight behind the blade, eyes staying wide so he could see it. So he could slay the dragon before his own eyes.

Elmer flinched at the noise for a second before the knife broke through his skull, just above the space between his eyes; right through his forehead through the pillow. His hand found itself clenched on the arm of his chair, before it slowly released and his entire body went limp in his throne. A king he may have been, with his own subject and throne, but he bled the same as a beggar. His body twitched, once, with a spinal reflex.

Aidan panted, staring as blood soaked the cushion over his father's head, the knife still sticking out of it. Aidan blinked in horror at what he had done, and then he gripped his own head, a slow smile spreading on his face. The monster was dead. He would never be hurt again. He _wasn't _useless. He _wasn't _stupid. He was free. His smile split to a grin, which broke into coughing fits of uncontrollable, gleeful laughter in which he was rolling on the floor.

When the police found the body, three weeks later, the place reeked of rotting flesh and blood, but the boy lived in it, taking care of himself as if nothing had changed. Aidan even introduced them to his father, sitting them on the couch opposite the throne, serving them cups of coffee and biscuits, as if nothing at all were wrong.

Because in his world, things were more _right _than they had ever been before.

* * *

><p>The Dai Li marched on Dahlia Coast, in swarms of deep green robes and shady hard conical hats, earning stares from the cityfolk and a few 'freakshow' jokes from builders on scaffolding. None of that mattered. The world would be theirs; Long Feng had promised that. The world would be theirs by the end of the day, and the people of this time would be helpless to stop them, just as the Air Nomads had been when their longtime rivals and then-business-partners, The Fire Nation had marched on the temples.<p>

They assembled in the heart of the city; a vast, emptying plot where circus tents were being packed up. Long Feng took center-stage and spoke like a true leader, a fist held high in the air as he addressed his men. "Today!" he began enthusiastically.

"Today our destiny is bestowed upon us, men! Today the world falls at our feet! Today we fight for our divine right to _power_!"

The Dai Li agents pushed their fists up to the sky. **"Strength! Might! Power!" **they recited proudly.

* * *

><p><em>'Aang better be putting together some awesome superhero strategy to get everyone out,' <em>Katara heard the devil on one shoulder mutter, and she agreed silently, as she opened her locker and stared into it. The note from that morning was still there, resting on top of a little box she kept earrings in. She picked it up and read it again, a slight smile finding its way onto her face.

_'Meet me in hallway D - Zuko,'_

Katara remembered his arms around her, his lips on hers, the soft, raspy words he uttered under his breath, as golden eyes fell on blue ones, need and concern and fear all but written on his skin. She put the note back and looked back into her locker, picking up her mother's diary. There had to be something in it to help her with this. If she screwed up …

No. She couldn't think like that! This had to work. She'd survived Jonathan Prescott, and she'd helped the FBI catch a serial kidnapper-slash-rapist-slash-murderer. Then again, maybe there were only so many times in life you were able to tempt the grim reaper; only so many times you were able to play chicken with fate. Katara was reminded of the night she and Zuko had spent laughing about all the crap that happened to them. It was surreal.

"Katara?" Aang asked from down the hall, bringing her attention from inside the locker. "It's time," he swallowed hard, glancing down to the large double doors into the drama hall.

Katara blinked at her friend and then smiled sadly, shutting her locker, with Zuko's note and her mother's diary inside. "I know," she answered, moving toward him, struggling not to drag her feet along. With a small breath to the warm summer air coming in from the windows, she glanced to the flash of blue lights outside; several police cars were pulling up in front of the school.

"You can sneak into the drama hall from the rafters, behind the stage curtain," Aang told her, walking alongside toward the stairwell nearby.

Katara mulled this over briefly. "And when I get in?"

"Get the guy's attention and get him to let you in."

With a snort, Katara grimaced. "I'll just do that," she murmured skeptically.

* * *

><p>Forty-five minutes to detonation.<p>

Some turned to poetry. Some to silence. Some to one another. Most turned to the single clock at the front of the room, watching, waiting.

Aidan Riker paced on his pedestal, eyes rolling over the school of weak-minded fools below him. This was where he always should've been; above, looking down on them. This was his rightful place, he mused, with a smirk on his face; looking down on his _subjects. _The smirk fell back and he scowled. Subjects. Throne. King Elmer. He glanced to one side of the hall, where his old friend sat on the floor, head hung miserably.

They could've been great together, him and Zuko.

A buzzing began in his pocket and he raised an eyebrow, slipping his cheap cell phone from his pocket. Maybe Daniel wanted to know how things were going. To Aidan's glee, the number was unrecognized and he smacked his thumb into the green button on the phone, gaining the full attention of his hostages again. He put the phone to his ear.

_"Aidan Riker?" _came a serious, middle-aged voice with chattering in the background.

Aidan grinned, eyes running along the room to see who it was who'd kept their phone to call the police and tell them just who was holding the school captive. "At your service," Aidan answered amicably and diplomatically; he'd have probably bowed formally if he'd been in the presence of the man on the other end.

_"This is Officer Kurt Van Pelt of the Dahlia Coast Police Squad. We've been made aware of two gunmen holding a hostage situation at Dahlia Coast Public High School, and are prepared to try to meet your demands, should you have any, provided you release your hostages, unharmed," _the voice explained calmly and coolly.

First the boy giggled breathily, then he chuckled heartily, and then he guffawed, just once, extremely amused. "I'll commend you on your cool head, but I'm afraid I can't release the hostages. I have no demands. In …" he checked his bulky watch, "forty-one minutes, a bomb is going to go off, releasing a lethal neurotoxin to the whole school, the whole city, and probably the whole state."

There was a long pause on the other end. _"And you're not going to be affected?"_

Aidan's calm demeanor changed to snarl. "It's a possibility, I'm sure, but I'm willing to die for a cause," he promised darkly.

Another slight pause. _"Riker, I've just received word that I'm allowed to grant you full immunity, a plane out of the country, and twenty grand in cash in exchange for-,"_

"I have no demands," Aidan repeated severely, eyes narrowed and his tongue snapping sharply as he spoke. That was all there was to it. He took the phone from his ear and dropped it to the waxed wooden floor under his feet, pointing his gun down at it. The room clapped hands over ears in preparation, and he squeezed the trigger, pushing a bullet through the phone and the floor at once. The line went dead, along with their connection to the outside world.

Then he ran serious gray-green eyes over the room.

"Alright," he snarled viciously, "Who was it? Who made that call?"

"I did," came a calm voice from (what?) behind him.

He whirled around to see a girl in blue standing not far behind him, and he heard kids gasping around the room; more prominently, he heard the choking catch of breath in Zuko's throat, along with a murmur of some kind of negation. Aidan lifted his gun toward her, the surprised expression on his face moving back into a hateful sneer that she met only with serene calmness.

Almost like …

_'Mom! Mom, come back!'_

**_'Go inside, Aidan, you fucking … jeez, Aidan …'_**

_'Wh-where are you going?'_

_'**To grammy, hon. Mommy's going to grammy.'**_

_'When are you coming back?'_

**_… 'Hon …'_**

_'**NO!**__ No, you can't leave me! Take me with you!'_

It took a short while for him to shake off his mother's memory and take a good look at the girl in front of him. He didn't recognize her at first, but then he noticed the defiant stare of Katara Marina and if it had been possible, his features would've hardened. He was unsure whether her calmness made him angrier or calmer, and that frustrated him in itself.

"I'll make you pay for that, you stupid bitch!" he cried out to her, vexed.

_'I'll make y'pay fer that, y'stupid brat!'_

Katara just shook her head at him and blinked slowly. "I'm sorry," she announced diplomatically, "But … I'm going to die anyway. What good would it do to waste a bullet on me?"

A dead silence fell across the hall.

Aidan stared at her, his arm raised and getting tired from being held so. He snorted defiantly, his mind racing. She _was _going to die anyway, and he'd need bullets to shoot his way past the police upon his escape. Bah! He wasn't about to let anyone get off with pulling a stunt like that! And how long had she been behind him? He growled under his breath.

"Get the fuck out of my sight," he seethed.

She eyed him as she moved swiftly past him and stepped off the stage, moving in mid-air as she descended the three-foot drop from the stage to the hall floor. The Marina girl didn't shy from his gaze at all. Her stare may have been as cold as his, but somehow embedded in a warm expression of … understanding? Aidan felt his head screaming at him. How did she get in here? Had she always been in here? How did she sneak up on him?

The girl in the leather jacket moved through the crowds that stared at her, and Aidan knew she hadn't been in here before. She'd gotten in, somehow.

If there was a way in, there was a way out.

* * *

><p>First they threw their arms around Katara; it was unavoidable. But as soon as the hugs were gone, Sokka grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly, demanding to know what it was that had made her stupid as to come back here. She could've lived, goddamn it! The fucking idiot! But then again, the kid with the gun had just said everyone in the whole city was going to die …<p>

"Why did you come back?" Sokka hissed, his grip on her so tight that his fingernails would leave crescent shapes in her skin, despite her long-sleeved shirt.

Katara peeled his hands off her and rubbed at where they had been. "To save you, that's why," she glanced over her shoulder up to where the kid with the gun was pacing.

"Are you crazy, Katara?" Suki stared at Katara with wide eyes, a hand still resting on her belly. "How? How the hell do you plan to do that? This isn't the same as-,"

Katara's brows tilted as Toph grabbed her elbow and looked up at her, a mixture of concern and suspicion and worry on her face. "Where's Aang?"

The Marina girl smiled weakly. "Aang's taking care of the sophomores and freshmen. He's fine."

Toph said nothing else. In fact, nobody said anything else. Katara looked to Zuko, who was staring at her silently, his features conveying anxiety and stress, despite the soft and worried way his eyes followed her. His look said all it needed to. _'You made me a promise.' _Katara just frowned back and shot him a look that answered, _'I have to do this.'_

Katara put her hands together and glanced back to the front of the room. "How long do we have?" she asked quietly.

Toph lifted her watch and glanced at it. "Ten minutes tops. Is that long enough?"

"It'll have to be," Katara grimaced. "Are you guys going to help me or not?" she looked to her brother wearily.

Sokka frowned hard at her before sighing and nodding. Suki nodded too. Katara's gaze shifted to Zuko, whose stare had fallen to the floor. He looked up and narrowed his eyes, nodding reluctantly. Katara smiled briefly, putting her arms around her brother's neck one more time, patting him on the shoulder and then moving to hug Toph and Suki at the same time. She knew better than to try and hug Zuko right now.

"Alright. Sokka, Suki, you guys get everyone to the back of the room; as far away from that bomb as possible," Katara pointed to her siblings, and then looked to Toph, "Toph, you stay back, but if I can't get him to turn off the bomb, I'm going to need your computer expertise. Zuko?" she dropped a blue stare in his direction. "You move those columns of chairs; try to build some cover," she pointed to the columns of stacked chairs by the walls.

Katara considered telling them exactly what the bomb was, but she didn't have time. Ten minutes to detonation.

Sokka and Suki left, pushing their way through the crowds, whispering as they went for everyone to get to the back of the room. Zuko took off for the sidelines, readying himself to slide the chairs across the floor. Katara pointed Toph to a sheltered spot not far from the stage, in the nook between two stacks of chairs, and the blind bandit darted toward it. Katara found herself standing in a clearing as the kids moved to the back of the hall, staring forward and taking steady breaths. _'Come on, Aang. Help me out here. Bust in here with some super moves, or something … I don't know if I can do this on my own …'_

"What's going on?" Aidan suddenly yelled from the front of the room, probably referring to everyone moving as one toward the back of the room.

Katara stood alone in the middle of the room, and she drew a shaky breath, addressing him carefully, her voice carrying. She ignored his question, approaching a more serious topic. "You have to stop this," she told him firmly, swallowing back a dry feeling in her throat. She doubted this was going to go well. "Before it gets out of hand," she insisted.

Aidan's eyes narrowed as he peered at her from his higher ground. "No. I don't. I don't have to do anything," he sneered, the corners of his mouth tilted up.

"Aidan," she began calmly; that was his name, right? It sounded strange on her tongue. "Turn it off," she heard her voice waver and cursed herself.

Aidan rolled his eyes and lifted the gun in her direction, "You know what, you're really starting to get on my nerves," he told her, his voice bordering on irritated, "You think you can tell me what to do? Are you fucking retarded?" he chuckled this time. "I'm in charge here, alright, little girl? _Capiche_?" he gestured with his gun a kind of 'get on with it' motion.

Katara put her hands up and stared into the barrel of the gun pensively. Had this been what her mother had last seen before she died? She'd always imagined staring down the barrel of a gun to be more metaphorical; some crap like staring into the pit of your impending doom, or whatever, but in all actuality, it was just a gun. A gun was just a gun. A bullet was just a bullet. If she died, she had no control of it. "Yeah," Katara answered dryly, "You are. You're in charge," she agreed carefully.

Aidan smirked. "Now you're getting the picture," his eyes shifted off to the side, where he saw Zuko, ducked behind the columns of chairs, eyes jumping between the girl with the blue eyes and the gun he held in his hand. Aidan's smirk deepened knowingly, but he said nothing. "I'll repeat it, since you weren't here, Marina; don't try to be a hero," his smirk dropped to a cool look of disinterest.

Katara ran her tongue over her lower lip, calculating her every word. She would've liked to think she was just buying time, but even if this guy took a bullet before the clock hit lunchtime, there was still a good chance the world would get thrown into chaos by a toxin that there was a good chance _he _didn't even fully understand. "Sometimes …" she paused, swallowing hard. "Someone has to," she answered, feeling some confidence finding its way into her voice. "Someone has to stand up for innocent people."

Aidan giggled at first, and then he chuckled humorlessly, his aiming arm dropping to his side as he turned his back to the Marina girl. "Ah, but it doesn't work like that. Not really," he looked over his shoulder to her, a look halfway between a scowl and a smirk on his face. "Nobody stands up for the _truly _weak. Nobody stands up for the _truly _helpless. There **is** no fucking _Robin Hood_ in this world to _steal from the rich _and _give to the poor._"

There was a pause of silence as Katara collected her thoughts, her hands slowly going back down.

Aidan then turned fully and tucked his thumbs into the belt-loops of his jeans. "No. When you're lying in a pool of your own blood, nobody comes to help you. The people you're supposed to be able to rely on to help you …" he heard his voice falter and pushed his brows downward, "… they leave you. They leave you to fend for yourself," he cast his eyes toward Zuko, and screwed up his face darkly.

Katara felt her face soften in understanding. She asked, tentatively, "Who left you?" barely above a breath.

**_'Aidan, go inside!'_**

_'No! Please, mom! PLEASE! Take me with you! Don't leave me with him!'_

Something felt strange in one of Aidan's eyes, and he blinked it away. "Stop it," he murmured under his breath. "Stop talking!" he yelled at the girl in the middle of the room, his fingers twitching on the gun in his hand, at his side.

Katara put her hands back up innocently. "Please, Aidan, just listen to me," she insisted gently, "I know-," Katara paused to swallow, "I know it hurts when-,"

"NO!" Aidan bellowed thunderously, "You don't. You have _no **idea!" **_he screamed, his voice echoing around him, coupled with his mother's voice in his ears. "You have no **fucking idea **what my life is made up of! Don't even pretend you have a clue what **PAIN **is!" he kicked out at the chair where the bomb sat, causing Katara's breath to hitch in her throat as the chair and the bomb wobbled precariously.

Katara found herself unable to speak.

Aidan marched toward her, hopping down from the stage, and she was frozen to the floor, unable to move. He was a few inches taller than Zuko Scorsese was, and towered over Katara from where he stood, three feet from her, a fist at one side and a gun at the other. _"**Pain**__," _he strained his voice, eyes squeezed so narrow his brows were twitching, "is when you're **sprawled** on the bathroom floor, the back of your head **bleeding** against the tile on the wall, and your face is so _fucking _**swollen** you can't even **see!**" he screamed, despite being only feet before her.

Katara blinked at him, eyes wide and wary, but her heart open to acceptance. She could see it now. In his eyes, she could see everything about him. It was a strange time to be thinking about Star Wars, but she recalled a wise saying from Yoda. _'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.' _He was just a child in a teenager's body, angry and hurt and scared. Nobody had given him the second chance Zuko had been given. Katara lowered her eyes.

"You," Aidan breathed hard, "have no idea what kind of pain I've suffered," and then he cursed under his breath at the strange sensations in his eyes. He swallowed, taking another step toward Katara until he was chest-to-chest with her. "I _suffered **agony, **_because …" his voice cracked, "because she left me. Because she left me with **him.**" And he pointed his eyes away.

_'But why? Why won't you take me with you, mom?'_

**_'Aidan, get out of the way!'_**

_'Please! I'll be better! I'll do all my homework, and I'll clean my room, and … and … mom, **please**__!'_

Katara nodded slowly and looked up to meet his eyes. She spoke again in understanding, barely above a whisper, "It …" she drew a tiny breath, "It wasn't your fault, Aidan," she hesitantly lifted a hand and placed it on his upper arm. He jumped slightly at her touch and snapped his gaze to hers. "She didn't leave because of anything you did," Katara told him tentatively.

Aidan felt his chest heaving and that strange feeling in his eyes getting worse. "But … but she left me … I don't know what I …"

Katara lifted her hand from his arm and put it on his cheek. "It _wasn't _your _fault,_" she insisted delicately, before she took both his cheeks in soft palms and gave him a soft smile, "She didn't leave because of you; she left because of _him," _Katara told him, despite not knowing who this 'him' was, and only knowing he was the reason Aidan was this way, "but leaving you, Aidan, leaving you was her _mistake_. If she'd taken you with her, she'd have known just how wonderful you are; how smart, and quick and strong you are."

Something salty and wet slipped down one of Aidan's cheeks and his eyes searched the blue ones. That heaving in his chest gave way for a monumental lump in his throat to crack his voice, despite the fact that he said no words, and croaked something that might have been 'I'm sorry' or 'help me' or 'don't leave me'. Much to the shorter girl's surprise, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder.

Slowly and soothingly, Katara put her arms around his shoulders as he hunched to clutch her in an embrace tighter than a vice-grip's. She rubbed slow circles with one hand on the expanse of his upper back. "Shh," she soothed, as he sobbed into her shoulder, and she squeezed her own eyes shut, hugging the older boy back.

"Marina!" someone shouted out loudly, causing her to snap her head up to look behind her. A boy was pointing to the back of the room; to the clock.

Katara caught her own breath on a horrified gasp that stopped before it got out of her chest. She fought against Aidan's grasp to get to the bomb in an instinctive, last-breath attempt to stop it. His grip was too tight; too desperate. The bomb made a fizzling noise that echoed through the global silence that had taken the hall by force. There was a click and a hiss, and then … deafening silence.

Zuko had no choice but to shut his eyes from where he was sheltered, as the explosion shook the entire building. He may have screamed her name, but neither he nor anyone else heard it. His own heartbeat echoed in his head; his breathing rasped in his ears. He tried to hear beyond that, but he couldn't.

Some people had told Zuko that Rome hadn't burnt in a day, when he said he had to undo a mistake he'd made. His uncle, for the most part, was the one who told him this. When he asked if he meant that Rome wasn't _built _in a day, Iroh just shook his head and told his nephew to allow some things to run their course. Maybe Rome hadn't burnt in a day, but Zuko had always wondered if it could have.

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><p><strong>AN: Part two of the two-part season finale of Life Is Like A Metaphor.**

**I really hope you all enjoyed this chapter, and the whole season to boot. I wanted to pay tribute to Aidan; he's been so good to my writing. You should try it - there's nothing more fun than writing a total psycho and then learning to understand how they came to be that way. Katara's always so confident and sure in this story, and I really wanted to try something new, so she was a bit careful; a little … uncertain … right there. I seriously considered bringing her in as the Painted Lady, but a shootout didn't have nearly the kind of potential as Aidan's breakdown did.**

**I want to cuddle Aidan now! Aww! :3 His whole make-up and character development was based on 'what Zuko could've turned out as', because of that 'not as big a jerk as you could have been award' thing that came up in The Western Air Temple. Now, for some Q&A!**

**I rarely answer reviews, but since it _is _****the season finale, I'll have a go.**

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><p>hopelessromantic <strong>: Yep! There will be a third season entitled <span>'Life Is Like A Lyric'<span>, and it will come out in January, on New Year's day, for sentimental reasons relating to the very first chapter of LILABOC (New Years' ^_^). Thanks so much for reviewing!**

Punch A Fish In The Face**: I love how enthusiastic you are about my story! You might actually be more excited than me! I know; I tried to do the Taang breakup as much justice as I could, because they are so great together. But I have a feeling Toph will be too happy when she sees Aang not to forgive him … ;)**

Embers in the flames**: Lydia? Oh, I love Lydia way too much to do that to her. (Spoiler Alert) Lydia is going to be a waterbender! I can't even imagine killing her off … someone has to die from time to time to keep a story interesting, but Lydia? No way! She's grown on me now. Thanks for your review! ^_^**

Ozuma thy AWESOME Vampanatic 8**: Lol, if only men really had that much restraint! :)**

Sarcasm22**: Thanks! I do try ^_^.**

xFantasiix**: I believe you requested an update … ? :D Thank you!**

PillowPet24**: Random bit of Trivia, I gave Sokka my birthweight :P Tubby-babies FTW! Thanks - reviews make my day!**

siriusly cool48: **I know! Lydia deserves it, though, and Toph and Aang don't get enough drama. Same goes for Iroh. Drama abounding! :3**

Zutara-Lova8: **Yeah, I was caught between too; I myself didn't know I was gonna stop them until I did it. Boo. And I kind of hate Aidan a little myself, but it's like he's my baby now - OC's always are - and it's hard not to love him ^_^**

Medusa': **Promise to make it up to you in the next season! Sexytiems coming up! Thanks for your review!**

: **I was thinking the same thing myself! Like 'omg how am I gonna tie it all up?' but I figured it out. Thanks!**

AnnaAza: **Ha, thanks! I did actually hope people would catch on that it was Hama without having to actually write it, but it had the right effect anyway. And I love the tarot-card scene. Yeah, that was a lot of the reason I stopped them; even if I totally tanked the finale, I know I can rely on Zutara to bring it back and recover. I had to keep some sexual tension in a jar! And yeah, Lydia is epic! Thanks so much!**

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><p><strong>Apologies to the other reviewers, but I'm dragging this author's note way too long, and I really need to post this chapter. The Season 3 Premiere will be up on New Year's Day 2012, and a promo for it will be up by Christmas Day, okay? Promise! Btw, karma just brought me cookies. Honest to god! I LOVE YOU GUYS!<strong>

**MERRY CHRISTMAS! (And happy birthday to Sagittarians like myself!)**


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